S3E10: How to Build the Perfect Marathon Training Block

I am your host jeff cunningham now listen When does my marathon block start is the question that I get from a lot of you guys.

And I always say, well, you know, we got to do the block before the block.

We have to do the prep before the prep, right? I've already done an entire episode on that, about running economy, showing up your foot speed, making sure that we're getting in the weight room.

We're doing strength and mobility stuff, doing some quote unquote non-specific things.

types of training, lots of fartlet, shorter speed workouts, hopping into Firecracker 5K.

I've already talked about all of that.

Well, all of that stuff is mostly behind us at this point.

We're right here at the very, very end of July, early August, right? And all of a sudden, you're looking at September, October, November, and it's time to get moving.

But there is some nuance to it.

There are some specifics that I want to get with you guys on and sort of the variability, the variances, variances, variability.

Hey, once again, I always like to tell you guys, it's my podcast.

I say what I want between each of you.

Okay.

For some of you, you look at this and you say, okay.

Well, how does periodization work here? I'm not racing till November or mid-November.

My buddy is racing in early October.

How does this look? And I'm going to go back to some of the stuff that I've hit on before.

First of all, we're talking about periodization.

We're now in going to be a more of a specific phase.

We are now done with sort of non-specific speed training, although we're going to leave some of the components of all of that in.

I always tell everybody, you got to leave certain components of your training in, essentially year round.

And, you know, Nobarto Canova, okay, probably maybe one of the three greatest marathon coaches in the world has talked about the need to make sure that we don't fall into this jogging base phase, right? Where we just go jog a whole bunch of easy miles and then suddenly expect to start running fast.

Well, I think that hopefully I've helped remedy that.

Some of that for some of you guys by talking about the prep before the prep in doing hill reps, doing speed work, strength and mobility work so that we're not neglecting sort of our speed, not neglecting those white fibers, not neglecting the components of this that's going to make us more economical in our running.

We need to look at where we are right now, though, in our periodization.