The optimal warm-up for the marathon depends on the level of the marathoner. For beginners, whose main goal is to finish, no warm-up is necessary. They can warm up during the first couple of miles of the race. For more serious marathoners, who will attempt to run the distance significantly faster than their normal training pace, the optimal warm-up consists of two runs of about 5 minutes each, with some gentle stretching in between.
You should start warming up about 30 to 40 minutes before the start of the race. Start your first warm-up run slowly, and gradually increase your pace so that you finish at about 1 minute per mile (per 1.6 km) slower than marathon race pace. Next, stretch for about 10 minutes, including loosening up your shoulders and neck. Follow that with another 5 minutes of running, this time gradually picking up the pace until you reach marathon pace for the final 30 seconds or so. Then stretch a bit more.
That’s it. Try to time your warm-up so that you finish no more than 10 minutes before the race starts. If you warm up too long before the race, you’ll lose some of the benefits of the warm-up yet will have still used up some of your carbohydrate stores. The ability to time your warm-up like this is an advantage of running a smaller marathon, as compared with a megarace, where you’re more likely to be herded to your starting position long before the race begins.
Before the start of the Olympic marathon, the athletes do a bit of nervous jogging around, but almost no one does more than 10 minutes of easy running plus one or two accelerations up to race pace. This is enough of a warm-up for these runners to handle a 5-minute-per-mile pace for the first mile. A similar routine will get you to the starting line prepared to handle your goal marathon race pace.
Your Pacing Strategy
Assuming that you have a time goal for the marathon, how should you go about trying to achieve that time? Some marathoners go out hard and then try to hang on as well as possible in the second half. Others try to run an even pace throughout. A few take it easy early on and then run the second half faster. Let’s consider the physiology of the marathon and the implications for your optimal pacing strategy.
In chapter 1, you saw that your marathon pace is very close to your lactate-threshold pace, which is determined by your oxygen consumption at your lactate threshold and your running economy. If you run faster than your lactate-threshold pace, then lactate accumulates in your muscles and blood; the hydrogen ions associated with the lactate deactivate the enzymes for energy production and make you slow down. When you exceed your lactate-threshold pace, you also use more glycogen, so your limited glycogen stores are depleted more quickly than necessary.
These basics of marathon physiology indicate that the best strategy for the marathon is relatively even pacing. If you run much faster than your overall race pace for part of the race, then you’ll use more glycogen than necessary and will likely start to accumulate lactate. If you run much slower than your overall race pace for part of the race, then you’ll need to make up for this lapse by running faster than the most efficient pace for another portion of the race. The optimal pacing strategy, then, is to run nearly even splits, taking into account the idiosyncrasies of the course you’ll be running.
Most runners shouldn’t try to run dead-even splits, however, because during the marathon you’ll gradually fatigue your slow-twitch muscle fibers and will start to recruit more of your fast-twitch A fibers to maintain your pace. Unfortunately, these fast-twitch fibers tend to be less economical than your slow-twitch fibers in their use of oxygen. Therefore, your running economy will tend to decrease slightly during the race, meaning that your lactate-threshold pace will decrease slightly as well. The result is that your optimal pace will be slightly reduced during the latter stages of the marathon.
For example, if your goal is to run 2:39 for the marathon, then even splits would require you to run 1:19:30 for each half of the race. To run even splits, you would have to increase your oxygen consumption and lactate level as your fatigue level increases during the second half of the race. A more efficient pacing strategy would be to go through halfway in 1:18 to 1:19 because doing so would allow you to slow by 2 to 3 percent during the second half and still achieve your goal. If you ran negative splits for the marathon (i.e., the second half faster than the first half), chances are that you ran more slowly than optimally during the first half of the race and could have had a faster finishing time.
For world-class marathoners, whose genetics and training put them on a higher plane, the optimal pacing strategy is likely a bit different. These select few are so highly trained that they have a lower tendency to recruit less-economical muscle fibers as the race progresses. In addition, they can pick up the pace over the last several miles and gradually accumulate lactate to the finish. For the best marathoners in the world, therefore, the most effective pacing strategy is to run the second half of the marathon at the same pace as, or even slightly faster than, the first half.
Most of the recent world records have followed this model of slightly faster second halves. In setting the world best of 2:03:59 at the 2008 Berlin Marathon, Haile Gebrselassie ran the first half in 62:05 and the second half in 61:54. In setting his first world record at this distance, Gebrselassie ran 2:04:26 at the 2007 Berlin Marathon, with half times of 62:29 and 61:57. Similarly, in her first world record, at the 2002 Chicago Marathon, Paula Radcliffe ran 2:17:18 by running the first half in 69:03 and the second half in 68:15. When
Catherine Ndereba
Fastest Marathon: 2:18:47
(Kenyan record, former world record)
Marathon Highlights:
Second place, 2004 and 2008 Olympics;
First place, 2003 and 2007 World
Championships
Kenya’s Catherine Ndereba can reasonably claim to be the best female marathoner in history. In an era of ever-increasing depth in the event, she has repeatedly risen to the highest levels of competition, achieving two Olympic silver medals, two World Championship titles, wins at Boston and Chicago, and, for good measure, at one point a world record. Her sustained excellence is a testament to her consistency and her ability to focus when it counts and to ease off at other times.
Ndereba is remarkable in that her mileage is relatively low for a champion marathoner. She rarely gets above 100 miles per week. Her training is straightforward: during a marathon buildup, she does one long run and two fast sessions per week. Some of her long runs are quite long, as long as three hours – more than half an hour longer than her marathon time. She does most of her long runs at an easy pace so that she can recover quickly from them. (Two massages each week undoubtedly contribute to her recovery.) Like many Kenyans, she does form drills and calisthenics several times a week.
With this program, Ndereba has remained injury-free. Her consistent training allows her to steadily build her fitness from year to year. There’s a lesson there for marathoners whose training often gets interrupted by injury – sometimes it’s better to aim for a lower mileage goal and to progress with season after season of good work than to push for spectacular highs and wind up enduring extreme lows.