Being a competitive person, I couldn’t run a marathon without thinking at least about a finishing time to aim for. Knowing that I was already in a rather good physical shape, I initially planned to start my proper training 1st of January, i.e., 4.5 months before the race. However, all of my January and February training plans were destroyed by a battle against a recurring tonsillitis (I'm of course grateful not to have gotten any worse health condition, with a tonsillitis being annoying but medical-wise not that bad). Consequently, I had 8 weeks without any training. Since that’s how life goes, I had no other choice but to accept my unlucky fate. While this might sound mature, I have to admit that I’m not only a quite competitive person, but I also tend to be somewhat inpatient, which is a lethal combination when one wants to recover from a long-lasting illness. Being aware of the dangers of endurance sports during/ after an infectious disease [1], instead of trying to make up for the lost training (which, honestly, I would have done quite sure a few years ago), I decided not to be an idiot and adjust my training as well as my ambitions.
Hence, my updated humble goal is to finish the marathon in less than 4 hours. Moreover, admittedly contradicting slightly the aforementioned ‚mature‘ mindset, depending on how my health and my training will evolve, I aim at being faster than two of my friends, who finished last year’s Munich marathon within 03:53:16 hours (allegedly without any specific training). While racing other people’s times seems foolish, knowing myself (and knowing my friends), I’m quite certain that it’ll be a big (although admittedly stupid) motivation. But maybe that’s what one needs during the last kilometers of a marathon. A finishing time of 3 hours and 53 minutes implies an average pace of about 5:29 min/km. Hence, my training efforts aim at getting myself to a state where I’m able to maintain a pace of 5:25 min/km over 42.2 kilometers. This is slightly faster than my above-stated goal time, and would correspond to a finishing time of 3:48:23 hours. While a small ambition is never a bad thing, this should further allow for some buffer time for unforeseen occurrences during the race, e.g., a toilet break.
The growing popularity of marathon running brings about a plethora of marathon training plans, with some running apps even offering personalized plans and guided training, e.g., in combination with a fitness watch. While such a guided training can for sure be helpful, I personally don’t like it, as I prefer to adapt my runs to my work/ free-time schedule, by also taking, e.g., weather conditions into account, which is especially crucial when training in Germany during winter. Further, I’m not an elite athlete and prefer to have some flexibility in my training, meaning that I don’t want to disappoint my virtual coach when I just don’t feel like doing the proposed run. Since I only have 60 days until the race, I decided to develop a 9-week training plan for myself, following the typical scheme of including a combination of training sessions with differenig intensity and distance covered.
For each week, I therefore aim at including a long distance run (> 15 km), some intermediate distance (5 - 10 km) slow and intermediate runs, and some short distance (< 5 km) fast and interval runs. I want to point out that all marathon prep guides I saw advised people to train for way longer than 9 weeks. Hence, providing a full disclaimer: this schedule is made up by me (I am (obviously) not a professional athlete nor a sports scientist). Anyone interested in training for a marathon shouldn’t follow this plan and instead look for a professional training plan/ advise a coach. Since I am not a beginner runner, I know my fitness level and, on the one hand, what kind of training my body can sustain, and on the other hand, what kind of runs my work schedule allows for. Since I have been sick for some time, I decided to start with getting back on track during the first weeks, after which I'll increase the intensity and distance. I came up with a masterpiece of a plan, which I already did not follow fully in the first week, partially due to a lack of time, but mostly due to me not feeling well when I should have done a run.
As it's my nature to be hard on myself, my honest and in my opinion realistic analysis on what's gone wrong is that I'm lacking a consistent mindset, which pushes me to go for a long run even when I don't feel like it, e.g., due to gut issues. Of course, I shouldn't go on a run with an active infection or similar, but I should learn to tackle, e.g., a negative mindset when my digestion is not working properly, which, given the crazy amount of time I took antibiotics this year, is no surprise. Therefore, to motivate (or challenge) myself, I decided to have my training plan as well as my progress "public", hoping that this will motivate me whenever I feel like not going for a run. Therefore, I created a marathon prep page, which contains each week's planned runs (grouped by intensity) and my current progress, which is updated daily, allowing for a direct tracking of my progress. Since I don't want to update the HTML file by hand, in the next blog post, I'll explain how I implemented a Python script that runs locally on my laptop, fetching my Garmin data to update the marathon prep HTML on a daily basis.
[1] M Börjesson et al. Return to Play After Infectious Disease, Return to Play in Football, 4:755–69 (2017) doi: 10.1007/978-3-662-55713-6_56