The Rest Is Easy

If you look closely at the training schedules in the two previous chapters, you might have noticed that I have you doing less work as your goal race nears, not more. That’s especially the case in the marathon schedule—your last long run is three weeks before your marathon. Whatever happened to use it or lose it?
Preparing for a top effort isn’t like cramming for a test or meeting a deadline at work. It takes time for your body to get the benefits of a training session. The day after a long run, you feel tired. But two weeks later, you feel stronger. The longer your race, the more important tapering is. In the marathon, tapering is especially important because of the whole glycogen-storage issue. When you taper, then obviously you’re not draining your glycogen supply as much. But because of your long runs, you’ve tricked your muscles into thinking that they had better be ready anytime, anywhere to fuel you for hours. So even though you’re barely running, they’re still suspicious that something is up, and they keep stockpiling glycogen at a high level. This gives you a larger gas tank on race day.
Notice what I said—you’re barely running. That’s a lot different than not running at all. If you follow the tapering plan in the marathon schedule, you’ll maintain the benefits of your hard work. Once you become fit, you don’t have to do as much running to maintain that fitness, at least for awhile. So in the three weeks before your marathon, you can, and should, gradually reduce your training.
Do your longest run three weeks before the marathon. The following week, do no more than 75 percent of your usual weekly mileage. The week after that, do no more than 60 percent of your usual weekly mileage. And the week before the marathon, do no more than 50 percent of your usual weekly mileage.

Don’t Hit The Wall

You might hear a runner explaining why she dropped out of a 5K by saying, “I hit The Wall.” Well, now she’s got two strikes against her: Not only did she not finish her race, but she’s misusing runner lingo. Get her a copy of this book and quick! When you get tired in a short race because you’re breathing so hard, that’s fatigue. When you’re doing a run of 90 minutes or more, and you’re feeling fine, and then all of a sudden, bam, every step is a major production and your pace gets way slower, that’s The Wall. Most people can store enough glycogen in their muscles to fuel about 18 to 20 miles of running. When you run long distances, your body senses that it’s getting low on glycogen. It wants to preserve that glycogen, so it starts to burn more fat. At this point, you’re able to maintain your pace, so you keep running. Your body has to keep doling out its precious glycogen stores, and it starts burning more and more fat.
By now, you can keep up your pace, but you have to work a little harder to do so because fat doesn’t burn as efficiently as glycogen when it comes to fueling your running. But you keep running because you were idiotic enough to listen to me when I told you how great the marathon is. Now your glycogen stores are getting very low, and you’re burning more and more fat.
That wouldn’t be all bad, except for this fact: Fat burns on a flame of glycogen. To keep running at your normal pace, you need at least enough glycogen to help burn the fat. But you’ve pretty much used it all up. You’re primarily burning fat, and fat takes a lot more oxygen to burn than glycogen does. As a result, you have to slow down dramatically, sometimes by more than two minutes per mile. You will want nothing more than to lie down by the side of the road. To top it off, you’ve also depleted the small amount of glycogen that’s stored in your liver. Your liver is supposed to feed this glycogen into your bloodstream to maintain your blood sugar well enough to feed your brain glucose. When this process starts breaking down, you feel woozy, light-headed, uncoordinated. Great!
You want to lie down by the side of the road, and now you’re getting so uncoordinated that you just might have your wish fulfilled. You’ve got as many as eight miles to go. Unless you’ve got incredible willpower, you’re a leading candidate to join the DNF list.
So how do people ever survive marathons? First and most important, they train. Long runs improve your body’s ability to store glycogen. Runners who do marathon training can store more than twice as much glycogen in their muscles as untrained people. Your body can get more fuel from the food that you eat when you train properly.
Also, marathoners start their marathons at a pace they know that they can maintain to the finish. The faster you run, the more glycogen you burn. Going out too fast in a marathon is a huge mistake, because even at a reasonable pace you’re going to need every last bit of glycogen that you can get. One trick that runners do to make sure that they don’t go out too fast in the marathon is to run the first mile one minute slower than the pace that they hope to average for the distance.
Even if you do the right training and pace yourself well in the marathon, The Wall can be pretty daunting. But what you do in the few days before the marathon can push it past the finish line.

A Run or a Race?

The fastest male marathoners in the world run 26.2 miles at faster than 5:00 per mile. The fastest female marathoners in the world run 26.2 miles at faster than 5:30 per mile. I think we can safely say that these people are racing the marathon. That was certainly how I went about it. For me, the challenge wasn’t just running 26.2 miles; it was seeing how fast I could run 26.2 miles. When I ran marathons at 5:00 per mile, I was running about a minute faster per mile than my usual training pace. Most people, however, are running the marathon just to conquer the distance. I’m all in favor of that approach. Remember the basic principle from Chapter 20: The first step to participating in any race is being able to cover the distance. The longer the race, the more that negotiating the distance becomes a limiting factor in performance. Almost anyone can run one mile faster than their regular training pace. Almost no one can run 50 miles faster than their regular training pace.
For your first marathon, your goal should be to finish. Trust me, that’s more than enough challenge for one race. If you define a race as trying to run the best that you can for a set distance on a given day, then just finishing your first marathon is a race. After you’ve done one or two marathons, then you can try to reduce your time.