Tune-up races serve two purposes. First, they provide feedback on your fitness, reducing an element of uncertainty about your marathon preparation. Second, they make you go through the nerves of racing, helping to reduce anxiety in the last few days and hours before the marathon. When you’re at your limit in the marathon, feeling tired, wondering whether you can hang on even though there are still 10 miles (16 km) to go, it helps to have been through the demands of racing at shorter distances. Even though the ultimate test (the marathon) is crueler, the preparation gained from shorter races is priceless.
By tune-up races, we mean all-out efforts, not races in which you give less than your best, such as races you use as the setting for a tempo run or marathon-pace run. Tune-up races can vary in length from 8K (5 mi) to 25K, depending on their training purpose. Races of 5K or shorter are less specific to marathon success, and races of 30K or longer require too much recovery.
Tune-up race distances can be divided into two categories. Races of 15K to 25K take at least 5 days to recover from, and you must place them strategically in your training program. These races provide the greatest physiological and psychological benefit. Therefore, prepare for these races with a mini-taper of 4 to 6 days. You can’t afford to taper any longer than 6 days because the tune-up race isn’t your primary goal, and you need to keep training for the marathon. A tune-up race of 15K to 25K really represents a training block of at least 10 days, consisting of 4 to 6 days of tapering, the race itself, and several days’ recovery before the next hard training session.
The second category of tune-up race distances is 8K to 12K. These races take less out of you and require less tapering and fewer recovery days than races of 15K or longer. You can approach tune-up races of 8K to 12K in two ways. First, you can train through them and treat them as an all-out effort done while fatigued. This will provide an excellent training stimulus as well as a mental challenge that will help steel you for the marathon. Racing when tired, however, brings the danger of believing that your finishing time and place represent your current fitness level. If you typically race 10K in 32:00 but run 33:10 in a tune-up race, you could interpret the result as meaning you’re not in shape, and you might start to train harder or become discouraged. It’s important to put the result in the context of the situation.
The other way to approach a tune-up race of 8K to 12K is to do a mini-taper and give yourself a couple of recovery days. This is the appropriate approach if you’re using the race to assess your fitness level or as a confidence booster leading up to the marathon. Table 1.4 indicates how close to a tune-up race you can do a hard workout without going into the race fatigued. Although you won’t see the benefits of the workout in this week’s race, you should be recovered enough so the workout doesn’t detract from your race performance.
Tempo runs are the easiest to recover from because they don’t break down the body as much as other forms of hard training. Long runs require at least 4 days of recovery to put in a good race effort, although replenishing glycogen stores generally requires only 48 hours. Interval workouts put the body under the most stress and require the longest time to recover from.
Now you know what physiological traits are needed to run a good marathon and how to train to improve those traits. More so than with any other popular distance, though, success in the marathon depends not only on what you do to your body but also on what you put in your body. Proper nutrition and hydration are critical when training for and running a marathon. They’re the subjects of the next chapter.
Chapter 2
Nutrition and Hydration
This chapter looks at two critical but often misunderstood factors in marathon preparation and racing – nutrition and hydration. Why are these matters critical? Because the two factors that typically conspire to make you slow in the last few miles of the marathon are glycogen depletion and dehydration. By understanding the role of nutrition for marathon preparation and racing, you can develop strategies to optimize your marathon performance.
This chapter discusses the importance of staying well hydrated and how to prevent dehydration, the roles of carbohydrate and fat as the primary fuels for endurance exercise and how to prevent glycogen depletion, the role of protein for endurance athletes, the need to maintain normal iron levels, and nutrition considerations for racing the marathon. Understanding the information in this chapter is an essential component of your marathon preparation.
The Importance of Hydration
Staying well hydrated is vital to successful marathoning during training and racing. Becoming dehydrated negatively affects your running performance and also slows your ability to recover for the next workout. Your blood and other fluids help remove waste products and bring nutrients to tissues for repair. Replacing lost fluids as quickly as possible after running, therefore, will speed your recovery.
Let’s take a look at the physiology of dehydration. When you sweat, the following chain of events occurs:
• Your blood volume decreases, so
• less blood returns to your heart; therefore,
• the amount of blood your heart pumps with each beat decreases, so
• less oxygen-rich blood reaches your working muscles; therefore,
• you produce less energy aerobically, and
• you must run at a slower pace.
These effects are magnified on a hot day because one of your body’s major responses to hot weather is to increase cooling by sending more blood to the skin to remove heat from the body; this process means that even less blood returns to the heart to be pumped to the working muscles. The result is a higher heart rate for a given pace and an inability to maintain the same pace as on a cool day. Looked at in another way, dehydration also reduces your body’s ability to maintain your core temperature because less blood is available to be sent to your skin, and your sweat rate decreases. Struggling to maintain a fast pace on a hot day becomes more dangerous as you become progressively more dehydrated and can lead to heatstroke.
The need to drink during the marathon is obvious. But staying well hydrated is also important during training. Don’t rely just on your thirst – your body’s thirst mechanism is imperfect. Marathoners sometimes become chronically dehydrated without realizing it. Interestingly, this seems to happen most often in the winter, when the need to drink isn’t as obvious. But whenever you’re running high mileage, you need to replace your body’s fluid losses daily, even if you’re training in conditions of -10 degrees Fahrenheit (-23 degrees Celsius). (Fun fact: One reason you can get dehydrated while running even in extremely cold weather is because some bodily fluids are lost when you burn glycogen.)
Dehydration isn’t all bad. When you become dehydrated from exercise, you provide a stimulus for your body to adapt to similar situations in the future by conserving more of what you drink after. The resulting expansion of your blood volume is a positive adaptation. The positive aspects of dehydration are true only up to a point – beyond a moderate amount of dehydration, you sacrifice performance during training, increase your recovery time, and increase your risk of heat-related illness.