Marathon Training Plan

Running down a dream... Marathon number 2 is Nice-Cannes, a point to point along the French Rivera on November 10th!





If I were better at social media, I'd create some amazing training montage video or instagram clip to illustrate my training plan, but since I am fairly low-tech, here's my marathon training schedule in boring written form. I have a plan from runners.fr, but modify it a little to fit into my life. For me, the key is to make it social and I've been organising most of the running training for my triathlon team, which is great-- since I'm the host, I have to show up and do it!

Monday: Rest

Tuesday: Easy 12K (usually alone on the trail near my house)

Wednesday: Track intervals with ExpaTRIés triathlon team (5-10K, depending on session)

Thursday: Tempo run 10K with ExpaTRIés triathlon team

Friday: Easy 10k (usually alone on the trail near my house)

Saturday: Long run (this week 15K) with running group Let's Run Paris

Sunday: Brick session: open water swim and 6K run. Through the tri team, we have annual memberships to the Cergy Leisure Park (base de loisirs) where we can swim in a lake (wet suit mandatory). I really like going out there, feels like you're on vacation far far away from Paris.

While I sometimes cut short or even skip the Friday run, especially if the Saturday one will be super long (as they will be in about a month or so), this is pretty much what I do and should be about 50K a week, which I think is the minimum you should be running cumulatively while training for a marathon. My goal is to run 200K this month. So far, I'm at 77K for August and should break 100 this weekend.

As my training progresses, the main change I'll make to this program is that the easy 12K will get a little longer, and I'll increase the distance up to 16K and it will become a steady pace run. The idea is that if I train myself at a steady pace, it will in theory take care of the first part of the marathon and prevent me from starting out too quickly (which I did in my last marathon). One of the other easy runs will also have to involve hills, since the second half of the marathon is supposed to be hilly (and frankly, after 30K, even a miniscule speed bump will seem like an imposing hill!)

This keeps me pretty busy, but will have to add cross training-- a second swim session would be good and maybe one spin class/cycling once a week. I also need to add circuit training once a week with a focus on abs and core work, since weight training is important. Not only for aesthetic reasons (it'll make me look good in a bathing suit!) but it helps you as a runner. After the Paris marathon, I was surprised that my core was sore, so it clearly wasn't strong enough to hold me up for 42.2K!