My First Marathon!

So my goal for the marathon was to finish under four hours and 30 minutes.

Back at the start of the year when I decided to run this thing, I read a book called How to Run Your First Marathon, and in it they said that running a marathon under five hours is usually considered running a proper marathon.

So that became my goal, under five hours.

Then I ran a half marathon in March in two hours and 21 minutes.

Now, that would obviously double to four hours and 42 minutes, but since a full marathon is actually a lot harder than just two half marathons put together, it seemed like 2:21 was just about where I needed to be in order to run that sub five-hour marathon I wanted.

But then I started to think to myself, "Well, maybe that goal is just a little bit too easy for me.

Maybe I need to make things just a little bit harder on myself." So I set a more challenging goal, and I stated it publicly before the marathon so that everybody knew I wasn't moving the goalpost or claiming that I hit my goal when I really didn't hit my goal.

So with that harder goal in mind, I decided that I needed a training plan that was gonna kinda attack whatever my weaknesses were.

So I really wanted to think about my weak links and just go after those.

Whatever the weak link was, I wanted to find it and make it stronger.

At first, that meant a lot of zone two training.

I really felt like I needed to build my aerobic base, and I did that for a good while, and I got my base up, and my weekly mileage kept coming up till it got up to about 30 miles a week.

But at that point, I started to feel like the weakest link in the chain wasn't my aerobic fitness anymore, it was my structural strength.

My left knee was bothering me at that mileage, and my Achilles on my right ankle was starting to get pretty sore.

So I shifted into, uh, strength training to go after that newer weakness.

After about a month of that, I had a little detour on the way to the marathon.

I wanted to run a 20-mile trail race with my friend called the Jigger Johnson.

So I did some hilly mountain training so that I could get myself ready, and I ran just about 21 miles with 6,000 feet of elevation gain during that race.

After that, the only thing left in my sights was this marathon goal, so I buckled down and I really focused on the build.

I brought my long runs from 12 miles up to about 18, and I worked in more threshold running, which is basically comfortably hard intervals, right at the edge of where you can still hold your pace a few minutes on, and then a short recovery, and then repeat.

That was the stuff that I'd kinda neglected earlier in the year when I was focusing on that base and strength training.

So after that marathon block was over, it was time for the taper.

That's, uh, usually a couple weeks before the race where you cut back your mileage quite a bit and let your legs recover so that you can start the race fresh.

The idea is to have a nice calm couple weeks of recovery.