Mesocycle 4 – Taper and Race
Mesocycle 1 – Endurance
Mesocycle 2 – Lactate Threshold + Endurance
Mesocycle 3 – Race Preparation
Mesocycle 4 – Taper and Race
Mesocycle 5 – Recovery
Chapter 12
Multiple Marathoning
This chapter is for those occasions when, for whatever perverse reason, you’ve decided to do two marathons with 12 weeks or less between. Though doing two (or more) marathons in rapid succession generally isn’t the best way to go after a personal best time, this chapter focuses on structuring your training to maximize your likelihood of success. It includes five schedules, covering 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4 weeks between marathons.
These schedules are substantially different from the schedules in chapters 9 through 11; the schedules in chapter 12 must start with helping you recover from marathon number 1 and then help you train and taper for marathon number 2. The number of weeks between marathons dictates how much time you devote to recovery, training, and tapering. For example, the 12-week schedule allows a relatively luxurious 4 weeks for recovery, whereas the 6-week schedule can allocate only 2 weeks to recovery.
The schedules in this chapter are written for marathoners who typically build to 60 to 70 miles (97 to 113 km) per week during marathon preparation. The 10- and 12-week schedules build to a peak weekly mileage of 67 (108 km), whereas the 8-, 6-, and 4-week schedules peak at 66(106 km), 60 (97 km), and 48 miles (77 km), respectively. If your mileage during marathon preparation is typically more than 70 miles (113 km) per week, then scale up the volume in these schedules moderately. Similarly, if your mileage typically peaks at less than 60 miles (97 km) per week, then scale the training back proportionately.
The schedules assume that you want to do your best in your second marathon. Though this might not mean running a personal best or even running as fast as in the first race in your double (or triple, or whatever), it does mean toeing the line with the intention of running as fast as you can that day. If your multiple-marathoning goal is to cruise comfortably through a second or third marathon soon after a peak effort, then ignore these schedules. Simply focus on recovering from your first race while interspersing enough long runs to maintain your endurance until your next one.
Why Multiple Marathoning?
Olympic gold medalist Frank Shorter said that you can’t run another marathon until you’ve forgotten your last one. If that’s so, then a lot of runners out there have short memories.
Although statistics in this area are hard to come by, anecdotal evidence suggests that many runners choose to circumvent the conventional wisdom – which is to do, at most, a spring and a fall marathon – and are running three, four, or more marathons a year. Some run a marathon a month. And we’re not just talking about middle-of-the-packers here. Gete Wami won the Berlin Marathon in September 2007. Five weeks later, she was back at it, battling Paula Radcliffe for victory at the New York City Marathon and fading only in the last few hundred meters. Still, she hung on for second and followed her Berlin time of 2:23:17 with a 2:23:32 on the much tougher New York City course.
Of course, Wami ran both so that she could win the $500,000 World Marathon Majors jackpot. You probably won’t have that financial incentive. So should you be a multiple marathoner? We can’t answer that question for you other than to describe why some people are drawn to multiple marathoning.
It’s rare to finish a marathon and – after the obligatory utterance of “Never again” – not think you could have run at least a little faster, if only X, Y, and Z hadn’t occurred. If you’ve run a less-than-satisfying marathon, but it didn’t seem to take too much out of you, and if another likely site for a good race looms several weeks ahead, then you might want to consider drawing on your horse-remounting skills.
A marathon run at a controlled but honest pace a few months before a peak effort can provide a significant training boost and a good measure of your fitness. If you run a race too hard or too close to your real goal race, of course, this is akin to pulling up roots to see how your carrots are growing. Certainly these are excellent opportunities to test your marathon drink, shoes, and the like in battle conditions.
As the growing popularity of destination marathons shows, a special knowledge of an area comes from covering it at length on foot. Many runners plan vacations around a scenic marathon for a chance to view the scenery in a way you can’t experience from a tour bus. When you combine such trips with a standard marathon schedule, you’re likely to run into instances of short turnaround times.
Some runners simply like to run marathons and to experience them in all their permutations, from intimate affairs such as the Green River Marathon (no entry fee and 52 finishers in 2007) in Kent, Washington; to medium-size marathons such as Napa Valley (1,800 runners traversing California wine country) and Twin Cities (8,000 runners along the Mississippi River at peak fall foliage); on up to the mega-events such as Chicago and Berlin. Even though marathons are held throughout the year, the traditional spring and fall clustering can mean that sampling the marathon world requires becoming a multiple marathoner.
How can we put this gently? Some runners are drawn to challenges for no better reason than because they sound good. This would include such undertakings as running a marathon a month for a year, running a marathon in all 50 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia, running one in every province and territory in Canada, and completing a marathon on every continent. The marathon-a-month goal obviously requires scant time between efforts, but so can the geographically based ones, given that you’ll be at the mercy of marathon planners.
“Normal” marathoners should check the amount of glass in their houses before throwing stones at multiple marathoners. After all, the bulk of this book has been devoted to detailing how to maximize your chances of success at an activity that the human body isn’t really suited for. So if some runners want to give the standard reason for undertaking such a challenge – “Because it’s there” – several times a year, well, it’s not as if they’re clubbing seals.
Reading the Schedules
The schedules are presented in a day-by-day format. This is in response to requests from readers of our first book, Road Racing for Serious Runners, to provide schedules that specify what to do each day of the week.