Minimum weekly mileage to avoid bonking in a marathon?

Stop half-assing it. If you want to run well in a marathon run twice a day 5-6 days a week with a long run on Sunday. At least 100 miles a week for months on end. If you need a year to build up to that mileage, take it, but no excuses. If you want to be good, do it.

Also, if you say you don't have the time, thats BS. The most essential thing is just running. The ancillary stuff like stretching, drills, core work, helps. But if you're in a time crunch you can find at least 2 hours a day to run and do no ancillary stuff.

This is the wrong question. The bonk happens from going too fast in the race. You can't just say "ok I did x mpw so I'm going to be ok." If your experience suggests you are a fast twitch guy, you have to be very careful and conservative in a marathon. It's not going to be your best event and your time projections from shorter races will be too fast. You will tend to feel like your marathon pace is easy, but your muscles are burning though glycogen much faster than a slow twitch runner. If you really are fast twitch, consider a super conservative pace for 19-20 miles to conserve glycogen then use your natural gift of speed to give it everything you have in the last 6-7.

In your next training cycle, increase the amount of MP running and avoid doing too much speed (>hmp) in the last 10 weeks.

I know plenty of guys doing 70-80 for the marathon. They're not exceptional, but they're in the 2:35-2:40 range, don't fall apart in the marathon, and aren't natural marathoners. So I think that mileage is fine if you're up from 50 last year. But the real key is going to be doing lots of marathon pace work.

I guess if you did a fast 3 mile run and a slow 20 mile run once per week.

23 mpw. But why bother running a marathon if you don't want to take it seriously?

If you bonked off of 50mpw you went out too fast and/or didn't fuel properly both before and during the race.

It sounds like you didn't learn much from your experience. It's not insufficient mileage that makes you bonk.

Back ion the 70s, Ken Young, who was a 2:25 marathoner and pretty decent ultra runner, came up with what he called the "Collapse Point Theory." I forget exactly how all the math worked when he wrote it up but essentially it came down to the idea that your MINIMUM daily mileage average for the three months prior to a race of any distance needed to bi a third of the total race distance, e.g., 2 miles or so for a 10km, 4.5 for a half marathon, 9 for a marathon, etc. You can take what you want from this theory, Young used it himself and did pretty well with it.

He emphasized that those mileages were absolute minimums, if you were looking to race well and maybe have a little in the tank for the entire race it was advisable to do more. At 70-80 a week you should be fine, according to this idea, but you still could wreck yourself with too fast a start.

Bonking is about going too fast for your current fitness. At 50 mpw you can complete a marathon without bonking, but clearly not at the pace you set out at.

Marathon pacing is hard to get right because unlike e.g. a 5k, you can't experiment every week to see how you get on at a given pace.

Bonking is more complex the people realize. Some people can pull off a non-bonk with under 40 miles per week. (maybe not the fastest but non-bonk)

Probably you either need to work on the nutrition side or take it easier at the start of the race.

As for nutrition, it's super complex and highly individual. Too much to go into but Matt Fitzgerald as a good book on the subject.

As for starting too fast. How muscles work is that not all muscle cells are recruited all at once. Your body holds back so as certain cells are damage or fatigue there are others that take over the load. If you go out hard your cells will fatigue faster leaving an increasingly smaller pool of cells to recruit. And as your body always a small pool of cells for emergency situations, it will recruit less and less cells to preserve that pool of cells. That can make you slow quite a bit.

Right on and AMEN.

Bonking is about pace not mpw. You can run 200mpw and still bonk.

Practice MP. Instead of doing slow 20+ long runs do a 18 miler with 10 - 14 miles at or near MP. That will prepare you for the last 10 miles of the marathon.

Piano_Man87 wrote:

If you bonked off of 50mpw you went out too fast and/or didn't fuel properly both before and during the race.

This is the correct answer.

Also, don't be ashamed to take in some nutrition *during* the race. Some of us just bonk without it. I'm amazed at how many people pop tons of gels during training and then expect that magically, on race day, their glycogen stores will become super-human.

If you were any good as a midD runner, you will ALWAYS be ABLE to bonk if you run the race just a little wrong.

The point of training and fueling is to really learn enough about yourself to know how fast you can run and not bonk.

Bonking has nothing to do with mileage.

there should never be a minimum. Give all the miles to the ones already doing high mileage. Their success will trickle down to you and lift you by your bootstraps into elite status.