(Updated July 18, 2026)
Training for Your First Marathon – A Different Approach
February 18, 2007 Categories: Guides
Lauri, my neighbor two doors down, is a personal trainer and Pilates and yoga instructor. Lauri emailed me and asked if I would help her friend train for the marathon. I was torn — on one hand, I know some foxy-old-guy tricks for making a first-time marathon less painful. On the other, I hate the marathon.
“Hate” is perhaps too strong. What I feel for the 26.2-mile distance is frustration. During my marathon years, I practiced the standard, “run 40 miles a week and finish a marathon” program, and as a result, I was never adequately trained for the distance. I never had a “good day” in the marathon. Even in my best races, the last six miles were murder.
After 12 marathons, I “retired” and began running trail ultramarathons. I ran ultras for seven years, and the experience destroyed any meager joy I had ever found in the shorter distance.
For starters, ultras are easier. Really; at least, up to 50 miles. Most ultras are run on trails where the footing is pleasantly varied and the scenery is pristine. The pace is relaxed, you can eat as much as you like, and the extreme distances tend to create a bond between the runners.
But those aren’t the only reasons I ran ultras. An ultramarathon strips you down. Veteran ultrarunner Gary Cantrell warns first-timers that, after the first 40 miles of their first 50 they’ll feel “like a very old, frail person.”
I ran ultras because I like that feeling. It’s an accurate description for what happens to you physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.
Humbled in body and mind, no longer able to fantasize or rationalize, you come in contact with the stark reality of your essential being. The only victory possible, when you can no longer think big ego-pleasing thoughts is to cultivate a big and open heart. It’s like a week-long backpacking trip where the city gradually melts away and you feel increasingly simple, cheerful, and childlike. Only in an ultra it happens in a few hours.
Marathons are nearly always run through big cities, on leg-battering pavement amid noise and crowds. Ultras are a quiet place where you can find yourself. A trail ultra is like a lonely western road that passes through an occasional small town. You can’t escape the city that is the marathon, because no matter where you go, the city comes along. The marathon reminds you of yourself without the city, as you are. The ultra challenges you to let go of yourself, because there’s no other way to win the game.
If you MUST run a marathon
Most runners at some point will at least think about running a marathon. My feeling is that if you’re going to run 26 miles, why not make it as pleasant and easy as possible. To that end, here’s my marathon training guide for beginners. Notice that it aims to help you finish a marathon. Veteran marathoners won’t find much help here. On the other hand, I’ve known marathoners who improved when they changed their approach.
The long run
Let’s face it, 26 miles is a long distance to travel on foot. The training programs that promise “finish a marathon on just 30 miles a week of running” do work – my complaint is that they don’t make a first-time marathon sufficiently easy and pain-free. I believe it can at least be easier.
There are two really bad ways to prepare for the marathon:
- Train too little.
- Emphasize the wrong kind of training.
I’m going to say something really crazy. Ready? If you’re training for your first marathon, think about running just once a week.
Okay, not literally. But you should realize – and I mean, understand it with every cell of your being – that there’s only one run every week that will truly improve your chances of finishing a marathon with your dignity intact. And that is, of course, the long run.
Can you spend 10 years training for your first marathon? No? That’s how long it takes to train to run the marathon competitively – that is, as close as possible to your ultimate potential. If you’re able to run no less than 60-70 miles a week, and if you can finish each training run feeling “pleasantly tired” but never wiped-out, you’ll likely be able to finish the marathon in style and run a personal best.
Ten years is how long it takes the top runners to realize their marathon potential. Ten years is how long it takes them to work up to running 100 to 130 miles per week.
If you haven’t got that much time or talent, you can still benefit from emulating the training of the champions – in principle, if not in mileage and pace. That’s because even the great runners know that what counts most is the long run
The long run will be your most important training session. Therefore, you must ruthlessly eliminate anything that interferes with the long run. For a beginning marathoner – and even for an elite – the long run is sacred. It’s the single aspect of your training that you must get right.
Many first-time marathoners work up to running 30 to 40 miles per week, with a 20- to 24-mile run every other week. In most runners’ minds, 30-40 miles a week is the minimum mileage it takes to finish a marathon. But they’re wrong.
Let’s imagine that this week you’ll be running 40 miles, with a long run on Saturday of 24 miles. During the long run, you’ll run straight through the first hour, then you’ll start taking walking breaks – you’ll run 5 minutes and walk 1 minute. Let’s say that this week you’ll be running 24 miles on the weekend and an additional 16 miles during the week.
Now ask yourself: How much will those extra 16 miles contribute to getting you ready for the marathon? Answer: Not much.
“Pleasantly tired” is the extremely important phrase that Arthur Lydiard used to describe how we should feel after every training run. “Pleasantly” means that when you finish a run, you should never feel staggeringly wiped-out. And that goes even more for the long run. Later, I’ll suggest some fuels and training methods that will help you finish your long runs feeling good.
For now, I’ll boldly assert that all of your running should be planned around the long run. You must protect the quality of the long run at all costs, because it’s the only part of your training that will get you through the marathon. Running 30-40 miles per week means nothing in itself. What matters is how you arrange those miles. Thus, the “extra” 16 miles in the example above are dangerous, because if you run them too hard, or run too long, they will erode the quality of the long run and diminish or eliminate its training effect.
It’s good to remind ourselves how training works. You give your body a bit more work than it’s used to, then you let it rest. In this way, you challenge your body, then you give it all the sleep and nourishment it needs to get stronger.
What happens if you start cutting corners on sleep and food? Right: your body won’t get better. If you eat poorly, get too little sleep, and run too far or fast, your body will take much longer to recover. And if you don’t give it the recovery it requires, it won’t get stronger; in fact, it will get weaker.
You’ll know when this happens. Instead of getting stronger and feeling better in your long runs, you’ll realize that you’re training harder, but your endurance is fading. There’s a hole in your enthusiasm and the air is leaking out. Take it from me, overtraining is no fun. It takes all the joy out of running.
Every body is different. Your biomechanics and VO2Max are decided by your genes. Your body’s response to training is also unique. Some bodies are able to thrive on training that would destroy a less-gifted body.
Different bodies aren’t just a tiny bit different – the differences can be huge. David L. Costill is one of the world’s leading sports physiologists. In a recent interview on Runner’s World Daily, Costill said:
When I coached Bob Fitts (a former champion distance runner, now one of the country’s most prominent muscle researchers), we used to have heated arguments about performance. He would insist that anybody could be a champion if they trained hard enough. He’s since changed his opinion. Now, he admits: “Oh no, it’s genetics.” If you start looking at genetics in a four-hour marathoner and a 2:05 guy, they are markedly different.
When Costill tested world-class distance runners in his lab, he found that they were able to run the marathon aerobically at a very high percentage of their maximum oxygen uptake capacity. Those tests destroy any simplistic theories about what’s “aerobic” – for example, that 65% to 75% is the “aerobic training zone,” and so on. In fact, each person’s “aerobic training zone” is different and unique.
When Costill tested former marathon record holder Derek Clayton of Australia (2:08:33), he had Clayton run for 30 minutes on a treadmill at his marathon pace of about 4:50 per mile. During the test run Clayton was able to hold a relaxed conversation with the lab techs, indicating that he was running aerobically. Costill notes that the ability of the top marathoners to run at very high speeds aerobically has been little studied and is poorly understood.
Whether that particular ability is “born,” or if it can be trained, isn’t known.
In The Joyful Athlete, I told how, at age 60, I was able to run about three miles at 96% of my maximum heart rate aerobically, with complete comfort (“The 96% Run”). I’m certainly not a gifted runner, but I had trained hard. I had included a weekly 20-minute run at 85% to 92% of my maximum heart rate. I had done those “tempo” runs once a week for three months. I conclude that the ability to run easily at close to maximum heart rate may be affected by training, but I’m not sure, and I can’t tell you the best training to achieve that effect. All I can say is that those tempo runs were painful.
The point I wanted to make, before I began babbling about Costill and VO2Max, is that we must train our own bodies starting exactly where they are and not as we might wish them to be. And that means giving the long run top priority, and carefully, with complete honesty, monitoring our recovery.
If we find ourselves doing all our long runs in a state of less than complete recovery, we might as well ask for a refund on our marathon entry fee, because there’s no way we’ll get progressively stronger in our training.
In The Joyful Athlete itness I told how ultramarathoner Eric Robinson claimed that he only began to make progress toward his racing goals when he cut back his training mileage drastically and began giving his body — as he put it — “massive amounts of rest.”
In the months before his first 100-mile trail race, Eric ran just once a week, plus a few fast quarters on the track at mid-week — and then only if he felt “exceptionally strong.” On that training, he grew steadily more fit and was able to finish the 106-mile Leadville Trail race in a respectable time.
I’m certainly not recommending that you run just once a week. Remember, there are tremendous differences in our bodies. My roommate many years ago was Ian Jackson. Ian won the northern California 50K race. He had trained for years with the UC Berkeley swimming team before he began running.
At one point, Ian fasted on water for seven days, during which he ran 20 miles every day at 6-minute place, together with Rich Delgado, a notoriously hard-training San Francisco Bay Area runner.
My point, obviously, is that there are very few bodies on planet Earth that would be capable of such a physiological feat. Ian’s body had a formidable ability to convert body fat into energy. Most people’s bodies don’t.
But I am urging you to monitor your recovery with great care. I’m also suggesting that if you’re feeling really flat after the first hour of a long run, you should stop immediately and call it a day. Walk home if necessary. What you must realize is that every mile you run in a wiped-out, exhausted state will be doubled or tripled and subtracted from your ability to get stronger.
Don’t worry. You won’t lose anything by running less or walking. In fact, you’ll be giving your body the rest it needs to get stronger. To make up for the down day, you may be able to do a cautious medium-length run at midweek. Maybe. Maybe not. You must learn to monitor the signals your body, mind, and emotions are sending you. When your body is tired, you feel bad. You feel moody, irritable, reactive. When your body is healed and healthy, you feel great all-round.
In the weeks and months before your first marathon, you almost certainly will experience a long run that “goes south.”
That’s just one of the reasons I don’t recommend trying to prepare for the marathon in 12 or 16 weeks, as some books cheerfully urge. Unless you’ve been doing long runs of at least 20 miles on a regular basis, I believe those programs are folly – unless you’re very talented, with a titanium body that recovers quickly.
Some bodies do get fit faster than others. A study that New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata describes in her book Ultimate Exercise found that just 10% of older subjects had bodies that responded extremely well to exercise, becoming fit quickly, while 10% responded hardly at all, and the rest spanned a broad range of average. If you have one of those highly trainable super-bodies, congrats. You may be able to finish your first marathon after training just 12 weeks.
How fast?
Where does speed fit into a beginning marathoner’s training program? How fast should you do your long runs? Should you do any speedwork?
Let’s look at these questions one at a time.
Should you do speedwork? Yes and no. No, if you haven’t been consistently running at least 20 miles a week for a year or more. It’s simply too risky. But yes, if you find, after a tentative speedwork session or two, that it isn’t interfering with your recovery for the next long run. And, just like very other run, you’ll need to monitor how your body feels before, during, and after speedwork. Speedwork can be dangerously deceptive. Of course it feels great, because it’s tremendously stimulating – and the body (and the ego) love the feeling of racing along in high gear.
Many top distance runners begin their long runs at a relaxed pace, then speed up gradually. Frank Shorter started his weekly 20-miler at 7-minute pace, which for him was a warm-up jog. Later he would drop the pace to 6:00, then finish at 5:00 pace – a little slower than his marathon race pace. It’s good to remember that for Shorter, 7:00 pace was roughly equivalent to 10- or 12-minute pace for a four-hour marathoner.
Starting slowly always, always, always works. You’ll always feel better late in your long runs, if you start slowly and give your body the time it needs to get completely warmed up. This applies to every distance from 5K to 100 miles and beyond. (Of course, you’d do your long warmup before racing a 5K.)
If you don’t warm up properly, your body simply won’t be able to perform at its full potential. Thousands of marathoners have reported that they feel better after the race when they run “negative splits” (the first half slower than the second).
I’ve discovered that if I run the entire first hour of my long runs no faster than 65% to 67% of my max heart rate, and if I’m fit and well-rested, I can gradually pick up the pace during the second hour and finish the run going very fast, very comfortably. But please note: I am not suggesting that you should go “very fast” in your long runs. In fact, I’m absolutely certain that it would be a tragic mistake, at least if your body isn’t in the gifted 10% speedster class. And … even then.
That’s because long runs are for building endurance, not speed. You cannot work on one during your long runs, without compromising the other.
I mention the issue of speeding-up during long runs because you can absolutely count on hearing from runners who do it, and brag about it.
After you’ve run a afew marathons, you may find that you can get a larger training effect if you speed up a little bit late in your long runs. But I would suggest that you should never go faster than 78-79% of your maximum heart rate during a long run. My experience suggests that 80% of MHR may be, for average runners like me, the dangerous dividing line. Go any faster and you won’t get the best training effect; in fact, you may have to shorten your long runs; but run comfortably just under 80%, and you may find that you’re able to develop your fitness and endurance.
All I can say is that I find, personally, that it feels deeply right to take a very long, slow warmup, then cruise at 78-79% of MHR. But if you’re training for your first marathon, you’d do well to limit your heart rate to 70-75%, tops.
The long warmup is hugely important. How long will it take your body to get warmed up? It’s completely individual. How can you know when your body is truly warmed-up? If you speed up tentatively and your body is able to relax into the faster pace, then you can know you’re warmed up. It will feel like you’re slipping effortlessly into a higher gear. There will be no sense of strain.
But on days when your body isn’t fully recovered, or it’s sub-par because of illness, poor sleep, stress, bad diet, etc., you won’t be able to run hard without an effort that feels like you’re grimly grinding.
The worst thing you can do on those days is to override your body’s wisdom and force it to run at a fast pace, just because you think you should or because you aren’t a wimp, or any other ridiculous reason your mind and ego will collude upon, giggling gnomishly, to try to get you to kill your dreams.
Your body will tell you very clearly if it’s okay to run hard – there will be a sense of ease and joy. Ignoring the body’s signals is a major mistake. It will take your preparation for the marathon backward; rely on it. The price of inappropriate fast running is slow recovery and little, no, or negative improvement.
Fueling for the long run
There’s some very good dietary advice for distance runners on the Hammer Nutrition website (https://hammernutrition.com). I won’t repeat it here, other than to highlight a couple of important items.
First, you should never try to replenish all of the carbs your body burns while you’re on a long run. This is a big mistake.
The makers of exercise drinks commonly tell people to imbibe carbs equal to what they expect to burn while exercising. But the problem with that approach is that it simply doesn’t work. When you run, your body burns carbs faster than it can absorb them from race drinks, food, or supplements. You’ll perform better if you replenish at a rate of 25-50 grams of carbohydrate per hour. (Your body’s ability to absorb carbs will be individual.) Follow the guidelines on the Hammer Nutrition site, and adjust as feels right for your body.
Second, don’t try to restore all of the electrolytes you use during the long run. Again, I suggest studying the Hammer Nutrition guidelines.
Finally, don’t try to guzzle too much water – although it’s extremely important to get enough. If the weather’s hot, and if you’re getting headaches after the long run, you can be sure that you’ve been drinking too little fluid, and possibly not getting enough electrolytes. Drinking too little can be fatal. But so can drinking too much – runners have died from over-hydration. It’s one reason to be sure to take electrolytes during your long runs and races.
Please note: these are general guidelines. As with every aspect of training, your body’s needs will be unique, and you’ll need to adjust your fuels accordingly.
Individual differences are never more important to take note of than when it comes to diet and exercise fuels. Some people thrive on Gatorade and other drinks that contain simple sugars, while many athletes begin to feel, deep into a long run or marathon, as if they’d swallowed a bowling ball after taking the same fuels.
For most long runs, I thrive on Clif Shot gels without caffeine. For marathons, and for the first 30 miles of an ultra, I do well on Hammer Nutrition Sustained Energy. I don’t do well at all on Hammer Nutrition’s Heed or Perpetuem drinks; however, many runners thrive on them.
How can you figure out which fuels will work best for you?
Try a simple test. During a long run, bring along a “reliable” energy source that you know from past experience works reasonably well for you.
Also, bring some of the fuel you want to test. Start with that fuel. If, at any point during the run, you experience the “cannonball-in-tummy” sensation, or any other negative symptoms, you can switch back to your old reliable fuel.
Be very careful: Gatorade and other simple sugar-based fuels work reasonably well for many runners for the first 15-18 miles and only reveal their devastating effects after 18-20 miles. Don’t imagine that you can rely on them during the marathon if you’ve only tested them during training runs shorter than 18-20 miles.
You should test your fuels during at least one 10-mile run without walking breaks, unless you plan to walk during the marathon. Negative symptoms often don’t show up until late in runs with walking breaks.
I formerly did many long run/walks of 30-35 miles on plain water and electrolytes. (I used Electrolyte Stamina Tabs from Trace Minerals Research, available in health food stores and online.)
If the course had hills, I would bring a single protein/carb bar and take a bite every hour, starting after 1½ hours. The reason I started taking no fuels is that a training partner told me he never took any kind of nourishment during long runs or marathons. He was an impressive runner, with a 3:05 marathon PR at age 64. After giving it a try I found I felt better during long runs when I didn’t take lots of fuel.
Those were straight-through runs of up to 20 miles, plus ultra-style training walk/runs: walk 1 minute and run 5 minutes on the flats, walk the uphills, run the downhills.
I felt fine during those runs, but I was completely wiped-out afterterward, and my recovery seemed to take a lot longer than it ought to.
I stopped doing the plain-water runs after ultrarunner Karl King, who’s a University of Minnesota professor of chemical engineering, told me that fuel-free long runs are hard on the body, because they make it produce abnormally high levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that can cause premature aging. Karl said that he’d never seen a runner who used plain water in long runs who didn’t look older than his years.
My recovery is much faster, now that I’m doing my long runs with Clif Shot, Electrolyte Stamina Tabs, and lots of water, and eating plenty of carbs immediately after the run, and getting a high-quality protein meal several hours later (typically, a cheese omelet with organic free-range eggs, or buttermilk and dates).
Not many runners are unaware that most of the carbohydrate we need during a run is stored in the body when we consume lots oof carbs immediately after the previous day’s run. Thus, a heavy carb breakfast the morning of a long run will have little benefit for the day’s run – we only need a couple hundred calories, at most, to top-up our stores.
Scheduling the long run
How often should you run long? Here’s a plan you can try. It’s based on Jeff Galloway’s Book on Running, by the 1972 U.S. Olympian.
Here’s the basic plan.
Run the same distance every week, but add one mile every other week until you’re up to 12 miles, then keep running 12 miles on alternate weeks, and add a mile to the in-between weeks, until you’re up to 16-18 miles.
Then do the longer runs by running straight through for the first two hours, then walk/run until you achieve a total distance every other week of 24 miles. If you find that you aren’t recovering in time for the next week’s medium-length run, you can do the 24 miles every three or four weeks. If you’re over 40, recovery from the long run will take longer; and if you’re over 50 you should monitor your recovery with extreme care and train accordingly.
During the walk/run portion, walk 1 minute and run 5 minutes on the flats. Walk the uphills and run the downhills. After you’ve done several 24-milers, you may want to experiment with walking an additional 2-4 miles past 24 at an easy pace to give yourself the satisfaction of covering the marathon distance.
Phil Maffetone, coach of six-time Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon winner Mark Allen and ultramarathon legend Stu Mittleman, believes it’s a very good idea to extend the long run a long way past the target distance with easy walking. He reports that many of the runners he’s coached who tried this had an easier time in the marathon. Maffetone feels it has something to do with our internal clock – “total time on the feet” makes a difference in how well we’re able to manage long distances on race day.
In an email to Joe Henderson, the founding editor of Runner’s World, I said, “I’m inclined to think that most 25- to 40-mpw runners are way under-trained.”
Joe replied:
Maybe some are, but that’s not my experience with five Marathon Teams, totaling 130 starters and 130 finishers. We don’t count weekly miles, but hardly anyone would top 40. Struggling finishes are few, after-effects are minimal. The key, I think, is that the long run is good and long. Any troubles a person might run into would likely surface in the training runs, which become marathon-like. Without these, the risks on raceday would be higher.
You’re right — 30 miles a week is too little for marathon training, if it’s six five-mile runs or five sixes or even three 10s. Even double that weekly might be inadequate if the runs are divided up equally. But if it’s a 20 and two fives, then it will work.
In a follow-up email, Joe wrote:
The least-quoted part of his (Jeff Galloway’s) program is what to do between the long runs. Not much. Don’t know if this makes his books, but he said at his camp last summer to do “one hour during the week. It can be a single hour, or two 30-minute runs, or three 20s. The point is, limit yourself to that hour.” Or as you would say, don’t do anything that interferes with the long run. I’d say the same.
When I followed Jeff Galloway’s program for the marathon, I made two huge mistakes: I focused on overall weekly mileage instead of the long run, and I did speedwork. As a result, I was continually overtrained; which meant I never reaped the improvement I was working so hard to achieve. I believe I’d have enjoyed my training a lot more, and gotten much better results, if I had put most of my energy into the long run.
A friend of mine made a similar mistake. He followed Galloway’s program, but he misjudged his ability. He ran speedwork at midweek, consisting of repeat miles, as Galloway recommends for experienced runners. But instead of running it at a realistic marathon goal pace, he ran his dream pace: 6:00 per mile. The all-out speedwork and the long runs were too much – in the marathon, he went out at 6:00-6:30 pace and crashed at 14 miles.
I’m 65 years old. I told Joe how I wasn’t recovering between my long runs. I was warming up at 65% of MHR for an hour, then running hard for an hour, up to 92% of MHR (I know, crazy), and I simply couldn’t do hard speedwork on the alternate weekends. As a result, I decided to limit my heart rate during the longer runs to 78-80%, after warming up for 40 minutes to an hour.
Here’s Joe’s reply:
George:
Our Marathon Teams do just that (and not much of that, at that). They alternate a long run one weekend with a tempo run (at about half the previous distance) the next.
Sounds good to me. The only thing I would add is that tempo runs have been proven less effective than intervals for improving speed at the 5K and 10K distances. (Source: a study reported, in the early- or mid-90s in Running Research News.