The schedule

Having read a number of marathon books, the following seemed to offer the most sensible schedules in terms of what I now understand about marathon training:


The schedule I'm following is the 18-week 70 miles or less per week schedule.

I can't really reproduce the schedule without violating copyright, but I guess I can describe it in more qualitative terms.

The schedule answers the problems I've found in past years with other schedules:
The weekend long runs have always been such a large proportion of the weekly mileage, and so much further than the other runs of the week, that they take a lot out of me - far more than perhaps they should. The schedule addresses this by adding fairly long runs midweek: I'll be typically running 14 or 15 miles on a Tuesday and 11 or 12 miles on a Thursday, after a 20+ mile run at the weekend, whereas in previous years my longest midweek run was only 10 miles.

Also on the subject of long runs, I've never felt I've done enough of them. Mike Gratton offered advice that the total of your 5 longest runs should add up to over 100 miles. The schedule does this.

The speed-work in this schedule seems far more sensible, in terms of it being oriented towards aerobic development. In previous years I've tried following the Runner's World schedules, which included 400m reps at 7:00/mile pace - I found this way too fast. Mind you, I think the RW schedules were aimed at someone with poor aerobic conditioning: someone capable of 7:00 miling, yet only capable of a 4hr marathon, in other words a big difference between paces at increasing distances. By contrast, my paces are far closer across the distances: 7:30 10k pace, 8:15 marathon pace, I think because my aerobic condition is far better from all the base training.

The speedwork is almost absent in the early weeks of this schedule, and only really kicks in in the last half, involving occasional VO2 max sessions, more regular Lactate Threshold runs, added to the regular aerobic conditioning steady pace runs. This is far more in line with my idea of how a marathon schedule should be.

Finally, here are some details of the long runs and weekly mileage in the remaining weeks:

Weeks to go	Long run	Mileage
11	21	69
10	20	66
9	15	66
8	15	59
7	22	70
6	18	68
5	17	70
4	18	63
3	20	68
2	17	56
1	13	46