Improve Your Marathon and Half Marathon Running E-Book

David Chalfen

• Herausgeber: Crowood
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Improve Your Marathon and Half Marathon Running is an accessible, jargon-free guide for athletes committed to improving their running at either distance. It provides valuable advice in increasing competition experience and structuring more advanced training programmes and covers; training plans and principles; evolving training programmes as a runner's experience increases; methods for cross-training in other disciplines; principles for athletes to examine the biomechanics of their running to improve performance; benefits of coaching; training case histories of successful athletes. 'David has a huge passion and knowledge of endurance running. His dynamism and expertise come across brilliantly in this extremely well written, useful and entertaining book.' Dan Robinson, four times Olympic and World Championship marathoner, and 2006 Commonwealth Games marathon medallist. Fully illustrated, this practical, guide is for all marathon and half marathon runners wanting to improve their performance.

Leseprobe

IMPROVE YOUR MARATHON AND HALF MARATHON RUNNING

David Chalfen

Foreword by Bud Baldaro

THE CROWOOD PRESS

First published in 2012 by The Crowood Press Ltd Ramsbury, Marlborough Wiltshire SN8 2HR

www.crowood.com

This e-Book first published in 2014

© David Chalfen 2012

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 84797 962 9

CONTENTS

Foreword – Bud Baldaro

About the Author

Preface

1 Introduction

Who Is This Book For?

The Marathon and Half-Marathon Race Distances

Other Long-Distance Races

Clubs and Training Groups

PART I – Training and Racing

2 Basic Training Principles

How It Works

What We Want From It

How We Improve It

Rates of Improvement – The Genetic Lottery

Structured Improvement

Coaching Support

3 Training – General Endurance Phase

Physiological Basics of the Events

Which Training Paces for Which Benefits?

Planning

General Training Cycle

Frequency of Marathons

Frequency of Half-Marathons

Mental Aspects

Learning from the Elite – Applying Good Practice

4 Marathon and Half-Marathon Training Specifics

Marathon Essentials

The Schedules

Fat Burning Pace in the Marathon

The Taper

Guiding Principles

Some Final Tips

And If That’s Not Enough…

Advanced Runner Case Histories

Half-Marathon Schedule

Marathon Pace Predictors and Pacing

During the Race

Preparing for Warm Weather Marathons

Don’t Forget about 10km

5 Aerobic Cross Training

Overview

Cycling

Elliptical Cross-Trainer

Aquajogging/Water Running

Swimming

Rowing/Indoor Rower/Canoe Ergo

6 Veterans’ Running

The Background

Long May You Run

The Best of the Best

Age Grading – Measuring Up

Veteran Medical Factors

Joint Problems

Recovery and Training Structures

Integration of Cross-Training

PART II – The Running Body

7 Running Movement and Technical Aspects

The Principles

The Running Movement Cycle

Barefoot Running

8 Flexibility, Strength and Physical Conditioning

Flexibility

Strength, Strength-Endurance and Power

Pilates

Theory Into Practice

Hills for All-Round Training Conditioning

9 Nutrition and Hydration

Overview

Basic Food Groups and Requirements

Some Specifics for Long-Distance Runners

10 Injury Factors

Overview of Overuse Injuries

Working With Medical Advice

11 Race Selections

Further Reading

Index

FOREWORD

David Chalfen is wonderfully well placed to write a book on marathon and half-marathon training. I have known Dave for many years and in that time have never failed to be impressed by his thirst for knowledge of a sport he loves profoundly.

As a coach for many years at club, student and area/international level, Dave certainly ‘knows his stuff’. He has been a student of the sport for numerous years and is a true aficionado of the road scene. Passionate and inspired by runners of all ability levels, he brings to the table a life-long love of the sport combined with a depth of knowledge and the ability to develop his points in a rational, accessible and comprehensible manner. He possesses a genuine insight into both the needs of runners and their patient progression, plus of course the very specific demands of the events.

Well planned and well written, this addition to the lore of road running will add significantly to required reading. The book is refreshingly honest and realistic, conveying well Dave’s desire to see runners of all levels realize their full potential. I have no doubt that many runners and coaches will benefit tremendously from Dave’s keenness and passion and above all the directness of his knowledge, so well presented in this book.

This book makes for happy and stimulating reading – ensure that you put into practice these good ideas.

Bud Baldaro Former UK Athletics Marathon coach and personal coach to Hannah England, World Championships Silver medallist in 2011 and to many British international runners

To Rosa, a most wonderful daughter.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Chalfen has been coaching endurance running for over a decade and has been running for more than thirty years. He is a Level 4 Performance UKA Coach and is an Area Endurance Coach Mentor for England Athletics, developing the endurance coaching network in North London and Hertfordshire. He has coached numerous distance runners ranging from national level to modest club level, and operates both as a volunteer coach – as a member of Serpentine Running Club – and via a website www.runcoach1to1.com. He has also acted as Team Manager for various international athletes at major marathons in Europe and Asia and has written feature articles about endurance running for Athletics Weekly. He competed at County level and ran ten marathons under 2 hours 35 minutes, with a best of 2.32. He lives in London. He was educated in North London and at Oxford University. This is his first book.

PREFACE

I was sitting in an Internet café in the hills in Andalucia when I received the email equivalent of a cold call from Crowood inviting me to write this book. My first reaction was one of suspicion akin to receiving an email from a West African ‘bank’ enquiring after my mother’s maiden name and asking to verify my Internet banking password. But it was bona fide and many thanks to Crowood editor Hannah Shakespeare for her faith in adding my name to the endurance writing publications list.

At the risk of self-aggrandisement, or perhaps just showing that I’m an embarrassingly slow learner, the knowledge and experience that has gone into this book has been almost forty years in the making. The first seeds were sown in 1972 when as a very shy eight-year-old I watched the 1972 Olympics from Munich. Amidst the British highlights and the deadly intrusion of the terrorist attacks on the Israeli team, it was the long-distance races that stuck in my mind. Finnish legend Lasse Virén achieving the 5,000m and 10,000m double on the track, and the wiry USA runner Frank Shorter coming home for a dominant marathon win had a key role in triggering the growth of long-distance running in the Western world. I thought it looked very exciting and wanted to be part of it. And so started my fascination with long-distance running.

By a mixture of luck and design, this brought me into some hotbeds of endurance running. My very first tentative track sessions at Shaftesbury Harriers in north-west London were done with one lane kept aside whilst the then World Record Holder for 10,000m, Dave Bedford, went through sessions trying to recapture his 1973 glory days. I progressed and was able to wear the Barnet Schools vest with some pride but little competence.

Through my later teens I persisted with a stable level of mediocrity. The typical scenario was that if I beat another Under 17 or Under 20 athlete they would see retirement from the sport – and in a couple of extreme cases emigrating to South America with an entirely new identity – as the only logical option to preserve some vestiges of self-respect. At University I could just about describe future World Cup Marathon Champion and 2.08 marathon performer Richard Nerurkar as a training partner on those days when his recovery run and my threshold effort happened to coincide.

To show how the marathon world has changed, I ran my first marathon just before turning eighteen. In an event that wasn’t even classified as an official competitive event, I placed forty-second in a time of 2hr 42min. Thirty years on, there is no race in Britain outside the mighty London Marathon where this sort of time would place so relatively far down the field.

Typical of many coaches, it was only after stopping my own competitive running (well, as competitive as my short stumpy legs and overzealous engagement with Mr Kipling’s exceedingly good cakes could manage) that I acquired the objectivity to drill down into the details of how to really optimize one’s endurance-running ability, whatever level that ability is. It’s a cliché that is only partly true, but distance running is in many ways the easiest sport to do – just put on your kit, head out the door and run, sometimes hard and sometimes easy, and if you do this very regularly you will improve considerably. However, it’s also just as easy to become a regularly injured runner or an underachieving runner. Indeed, most experienced runners will at different stages encounter both situations and the goal – which I hope this book will contribute to – is to ensure that the large majority of one’s running years are spent achieving the best results that are achievable for each individual’s ability and training commitment.

My time so far in coaching has been supported by all of the following who contribute to the immense enjoyment we gain from the fulfilling yet existentially futile attempts to help people run a long way a little bit quicker than the last time they tried it:

In particular, Bud Baldaro and Geoff Williams, great motivators and special people who have such a lasting and positive influence on so many. And they also help them to run faster. Outside the running world, Kevin Hickey MBE has been a tremendously wise and supportive mentor and adviser on the broader aspects of sports coaching.

Also my friend and clubmate Urban Bettag, a master of constructive criticism. And Bev Kitching; Stella Bandu; Dave Newport; Martin Rush; Peter McHugh; Nick Anderson; Dave Sunderland; Bryan Smith; and Ian Ladbrooke.

Photo credits – Urban Bettag, Ian Hodge and Rosa Chalfen.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

Who Is This Book For?

Here is an outline of what this book offers:

•

A guide to the training principles of both distances that explains what is contained within the training plans.

•

Some detailed programmes that show how the principles can be addressed on a practical level and evolved as the runner’s experience – and hopefully also their commitment and performance – evolves.

•

Some case histories of runners with high levels of commitment and modest levels of talent to show what can be done – a combination of information and inspiration.

The book thoroughly covers what an experienced long-distance running coach can bring to improving runners. A coach will have some grounding in: anatomy; physiology; nutrition; hydration; psychology; strength and conditioning; mentoring; and other relevant elements – but won’t usually be a professionally qualified expert in all of these fields. But no apologies for that – coaches are serial magpies, dipping into anywhere they can find the extra ‘one percenters’ to help the people they coach.

What cannot be provided in these pages are any guarantees as to how successful your running will be, even if you follow all the advice. Nor does the content address beyond a relevant level of theoretical and practical detail the full minutiae of some of the sports science that has informed and guided the training principles and programmes. Therefore, you will find that the book has a relatively large proportion of its pages allocated to the ‘bread and butter’ of training for endurance running. There is a lesser emphasis on aspects such as nutrition and sports medicine, because there are publications available by proven experts in these fields.

This approach is also intended to give the book a greater ‘added value’ to what you can find on the Internet. There is vast information on the web regarding diet, physiology, static stretching and race calendars, and there is perhaps limited benefit in simply replicating this data in book form. What this book does is to offer a logical and detailed approach on how to plan and carry out your endurance training and racing, underpinned by the other factors that will affect your performance. Readers are then signposted to other specialist publications if they wish to drill down into these supplementary elements. It is, as it were, the published version of how running coaches work in real life.

The running world is hugely diverse in what the profiles of ‘improvers’ will be. A debut marathoner may have no running background, but years of training in sports such as cycling, swimming, rowing or skiing, so although their running history may be close to zero, their aerobic base will be high. It may be much higher than someone who has been running for three years from scratch and has covered a few thousand miles in that period.

Whatever you may have seen elsewhere, this book does not categorize any of the training plans by target time. The reasoning is that some people have high levels of running talent, while other people’s genetics are less naturally honed for distance running. A purported sub-3-hour marathon schedule may be followed by someone with great genes and help them do sub-2.35. Conversely, someone with much poorer endurance traits may do the same plan and struggle to break 3.30.

Of course, in addition to the genetics, there are the significant effects of gender, age and bodyweight. Specifically on gender, female performances of equal merit to men’s are about 15 per cent slower. If you do the maths, you may be slightly surprised and perceive this as being harsh on assessing women’s performances, but it actually reflects the fact that there are still more men than women who compete in distance races and – looking across the generality of runners – that more men become involved in serious running training.

That said, the author strongly believes that the large majority of long-distance runners, both men and women, do not realize what they can achieve and tend to overestimate what level of ability is needed to run what are pretty modest times. Of course, you have to put the work in to do so, but the challenge is in many ways the attraction.

However, let’s put a few numbers onto the generalizations, to indicate what sort of runner should find this book relevant:

•

You are already running regularly for much of the year and currently, or very soon, can regularly commit four days per week to some running training.

•

You have already done one or more running race of at least 5km or 10km, so even if you have not yet tackled a marathon or half-marathon you are an improving runner.

•

You expect to be able to run or jog all the way in your target races.

The United Kingdom rankings show that in 2010 some 1,800 men broke 3 hours for the marathon, with just under 2,000 women running sub-3.45. In the same year, 1,800 men broke 80 minutes for the half-marathon and 1,300 women dipped under 94 minutes for the distance. Within these numbers, and particularly at the lower end of these rankings, would be many veterans in their forties and occasionally a talented and committed fifty-plus athlete.

It is likely that if you can consistently follow any of the training programmes described in this book for at least a couple of years, and you are under forty-five years old and keep your Body Mass Index (BMI) at around twenty-five or lower, you should be able to get to within about 5 per cent of the times stated above as the minimum performances to make these rankings lists (seewww.thepowerof10.info/rankings for full information).

The training schedules shown in later chapters are based around these premises. They are not intended to be for ‘Get Me Round’ runners, nor in all likelihood would one expect a national level runner – say Top Twenty or so in the UK rankings – to be tapping into this book, as the author would hope that at that level of ability and commitment there is an individual coach–athlete relationship to optimize the runner’s talent. The schedules can be used by anybody between these two categories.

Indeed, if you progress from the schedules provided here, follow the advice on how to move to the next stage, then use the details from the advanced runners’ case histories as illustrations of how to really stretch yourself, there is no reason why this book could not be used to guide you towards marathon times heading towards 2.30 for men and 2.50 for women. That level of commitment will not be for everyone and will take a few years rather than a few months, but the option is there if that is something you would like to prioritize.

The training details are divided into different levels and the author suggests that – irrespective of your current Personal Bests (PBs) – if you wish to structure your training around any of these programmes, you start with whatever level looks like the most gradual step forwards from the current volume and intensity at which you are working.

Whatever information you may gain from this book, the one thing it will not do is put on your running kit and get you out of the door for a training run. Or as legendary American basketball coach John Wooden put it, ‘Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.’

Enjoy the read and good luck with your running performances.

The Marathon and Half-Marathon Race Distances

As an introduction to why this book is focused on the marathon and half-marathon rather than entitled, say, Improving at 11 and 22 Miles, here is a very brief history lesson. The marathon was used as the long-distance race in the modern Olympics when they were introduced in 1896 in Athens, to recreate the outline of the track and field programme in the Ancient Greek Olympics. In a bow to nineteenth-century etiquette, athletes wore clothes rather than competing nude as they had in ancient days.

Most races now attract a wide range of running experience and performance.

Old-style, low-key road-race start.

In the early days, distances varied around 25 miles (40km). For the 1908 Games in London, however, the course was extended to ensure that athletes finished in front of the Royal Box, occupied by Queen Alexandra. The distance that day turned out to be 26 miles 385yd (42.195km). Further variations on the theme followed until from 1921 onwards, when the World Athletics Federation came into being, the distance was agreed as 42.195km. As a globally recognizable word, the marathon distance seems likely to be with us for as long as people seek long-distance running challenges. So should you ever find the last few miles of a marathon particularly hellish (reading to the end of this book is intended to make this a less likely occurrence), then you can blame the Royal Family with historical accuracy on your side.

For any runners with an element of competitive spirit, there is a very fundamental challenge of wishing to see if they can run a long way without stopping; and then to see if they can cover the distance faster than other people and faster than their previous attempts.

In Britain, until the very late 1970s, the road-race options below marathon focused on 5-, 10- and 20-milers, particularly 10s, whilst in Europe it was mainly 10, and 20 or 25km. As the marathon boom in Britain – which took place about three or four years after a similar trend in the USA – caused a huge upsurge in the number and scale of events from about 1979/80 onwards, more and more new events focused on the half-marathon. The arithmetical half had a clear logic to it, and indeed many new marathon events used a two-lap course, whereby half-marathons ended after a single lap. Many of the traditional 10-mile races were in areas where traffic had increased substantially, with all the associated practical difficulties and extra costs. So the trend has been a gradual decline in 10-mile races and a growth in half-marathons. This has coincided with a shift towards professional event management companies taking on the events where participant numbers run into the thousands, although of course the ‘traditional’ club-based races organized by volunteers still exist across the country.

A particularly British trend has been that the sheer scale and public profile of the London Marathon has made it financially challenging for many second-tier marathons to stay afloat, as many thousands of people enter London and if not accepted they simply do not carry on training as there is no other marathon that they are drawn to. The likes of Holland, Spain, Italy and Germany have maybe a wider spread of quality marathons. However, the encouraging growth in the UK of new marathons such as Edinburgh and Brighton, backed up by proven stalwarts such as Belfast, Nottingham, Lochaber and Abingdon, offers a healthy range of options across the main marathon seasons of spring and autumn. At the time of writing, Liverpool and Manchester are also resurrecting marathons that had been run in previous decades but had fallen by the wayside of other urban pressures.

Modern trends of globalization, budget airlines and, for most, increasing disposable income, lead to many people now taking a more international approach to their running plans, particularly for marathons. Chapter 11 suggests a few options beyond the global big hitters.

This isn’t a travel guide but the international angle does have a few points relevant to running performance.

It means that the marathon and half-marathon season in Europe becomes longer. The biggest events invariably try to avoid the most extreme weather in their respective countries. So the trend is that in Northern Europe and Scandinavia the main marathons are held around June, as any earlier would risk extreme cold weather for much of the training build-up of the domestic runners. Travel south to Italy and Spain and they tend to opt for February/March and then an autumn block in November, using dates when difficult hot weather is unlikely to be a factor. It is like a modern version of the eighteenth-century’s Grand Tour, with a higher aerobic challenge but fewer highwaymen.

Many road races may use some off-road surface on the course.

A typical road-racing cross-section of seniors, veterans, men and women, club runners and unaffiliated.

These extended seasons mean that for a race-greedy marathoner the options are increased. For example, one could go for Seville in early February, London in mid/late April, Helsinki in early August and Florence in late November. It’s a demanding schedule and although not insane it’s unlikely to be optimum for performance. However, such a schedule would allow for four structured cycles of preparation with a progression from recovery through transition, then event-specific training, then taper, race and start the recovery again. More on this in Chapter 4.

Other Long-Distance Races

It is also worth clarifying at this stage that for the purposes of this book, we are looking at marathons and half-marathons as standard road events held entirely or almost entirely on a normal road surface. Also, although many events will be undulating to some degree, this book does not consider mountain races or even long-distance hill races. These are addressed in excellent and expert detail in Sarah Rowell’s Crowood book Off-Road Running.

Make sensible preparations for particularly extreme racing conditions.