How to Finish a Marathon?

To finish a marathon, the least you need to do is still pretty darned much. There’s no way to get around the necessity of long runs—that’s why they’re the focus of this marathon training schedule. As a first-time marathoner, your goal should be to cover the distance. The way to do that is to gradually build the distance that you can cover without having to slow dramatically in the last few miles.
These long runs are probably longer than you’ve ever run. They’re all the training stress that your body needs, so this schedule doesn’t include any speed workouts. At this point, they’ll just get in the way of recovering from your long runs. But you will be doing striders. Most weeks, you’ll be doing them twice. That’s because when you do nothing but train for marathons, it’s easy for your form to deteriorate. You’re always just shuffling along, not moving through a full range of motion. Striders will help you to improve your form, and they’re a fun contrast to the long runs.
Where the schedule says “2 12” under striders, that means that on two other runs that week, do striders. When it says “1 12,” just do striders once that week. Make one of your striders days the last run that you do before the next week’s long run. For example, if your long run is on a Sunday and you are going for a run the previous Friday, do striders on Friday. Don’t do striders the day after a long run.
The schedule doesn’t have you running a long run every week. That would be too much because your long run starts getting up there in distance. On the weeks when you’re not going long, you’ll see that it says “10 miles” under the “Hilly run” column heading. On these weeks, I want you to do a hilly 10-mile run on the day that you usually do your long run. This run will help to build leg strength and will give your VO2 max a bit of a boost.
The long runs are the key to this schedule. How much you run the rest of the week depends on how quickly you recover from the long runs. You should be running at least two other days most weeks. (Gotta do those striders!) It would be good if most weeks you included a run in the middle of the week that was half the distance of your last long run. For example, in week 6, your last long run was an 18-miler in week 5. So in week 6, do a 9-miler in addition to the hilly 10-miler. These medium-long runs in the middle of the week will help to consolidate the gains from the long run.
With two weeks to go, try to run a 15K to half-marathon race. Don’t worry so much about your pace as about experiencing a race atmosphere. A lot of first-time marathoners train in isolation for months, never enter a race, and freak out when suddenly they’re surrounded by thousands of others in a marathon.