S3E2: The Build Before the Build: How to Prep for a Fall Marathon

We could call it the build for the build.

Right.

And what I'm telling you is this.

You don't want to, quote unquote, start training for a marathon and have to spend time.

The bulk of your marathon block, the bulk of your marathon prep, when I say the bulk, I mean, you know, 50, 60, 70% of the weeks, just trying to get back in shape, trying to work yourself back to maybe, quote unquote, where you were at some point in time.

I mean, and when I say that, I mean, you know, maybe it was a few months ago.

Maybe it was a few years ago.

But my point is you don't want to spend all that time just doing that.

Right.

And so what I'm telling you is there's a way to be in shape.

without being neurologically fried.

There's a way to be in shape without being burnt out.

There's a way to be in shape without being tired of running and tired from running when you, quote unquote, start your marathon block.

You want to be prepared.

You want to be ready for the rigors of the build.

You want to, assuming you're doing it because maybe you have a goal, you want to be better than you were, how do we get there? How do we get that done? And it's June, and I've had a whole lot of people with sort of this, they look like a lost dog, just kind of just out wandering since the Boston Marathon, right? Or since the Eugene Marathon, or since the Jersey City Marathon in April, right? We've got...

You know, there's a few good marathons out there, but the reality is we have grandmas coming up here later on in the month, right? But most of the spring marathons are behind us, right? So what do we do? And I get this question a lot.

Coach, what do I do? Jeff, what am I supposed to do? Like, what do I use June and July for? And, well, I have some answers for you, okay? Now, I use, obviously, be consistently good over occasionally great all the time.

It's sort of a mantra, right? And I think it was in season one, I talked about the consistently good paradox, okay? And the consistently good paradox basically is...

Doing the same thing all the time isn't necessarily the way to get better at every step of the way.

And so while I say be consistently good, redundancy creates excellence, all these things, we do have to be careful that within sort of certain periods of time or between certain periods of time, we don't just simply just sort of do a rinse and repeat thing.

Because if you do a... rinse and repeat.

You might actually just get a repeat of what you've done before when maybe you want to progress.

So when I talked about the consistently good paradox, what I say is, yeah, generally speaking, being consistent, doing the same thing over and over, redundancies really do create excellence.

But maybe it's redundancy on certain things, maybe within a block of time, within a cycle, okay? Um...