You have 3 years to train for the next Olympic marathon trials. What’s the best way to do it?

I'd do multiple marathon cycles that ended in races. The 31 months of base sounds great and all, but the body and the mind need both some downtime and something to shoot for. Plus, the marathon is a fickle beast. You need time practicing the distance and understanding how to handle issues that could come up.

I don't think I'd run two marathons a year into the lead up, though. Maybe just one a year. Or one every 9 to 10 months. That would give you plenty of time to hit the monster base miles and live at altitude, but also good practice actually racing and executing.

Um, ever hear of Gregory? Dude won the Olympics off the couch.

itdepends wrote:

I'd do multiple marathon cycles that ended in races. The 31 months of base sounds great and all, but the body and the mind need both some downtime and something to shoot for. Plus, the marathon is a fickle beast. You need time practicing the distance and understanding how to handle issues that could come up.

I don't think I'd run two marathons a year into the lead up, though. Maybe just one a year. Or one every 9 to 10 months. That would give you plenty of time to hit the monster base miles and live at altitude, but also good practice actually racing and executing.

I like this, actually. I think it's great advice. I'd throw this in: make the specific phase truly marathon specific as opposed to 10k training with easy 20 milers. What I mean is described very well in a few places. You can look here:

I posted in there with a sequence of workouts I consider to be very marathon specific. I also linked to Nate Jenkins' writings. Although not super famous as coach or runner himself, he really developed an understanding of how dissimilar ideal marathon training is from ideal training for shorter events. These ideas were straight from Canova as he admits. He explained this in a way that really made sense to me. The workout sequence I described was heavily influenced by Nate and of course Renato himself. The concepts in question can be used by a spectrum of abilities including me in old age. The differences between me, a decent runner half my age, and a Kenyan superstar are primarily in the paces but also in the length of time between hard sessions and the amount of running during such space.

Another idea:

Do one or two half marathon buildups and races in addition to the marathons mentioned by the poster I quoted. I believe that post is dead-on about needing to race a few of them to really get it right - at least for most folks. I believe a certain amount of training for something shorter and faster can help also. I got this from Ritz (read his writing in Podium Runner) and Ryan Hall (don't remember where he wrote it, but he believes he'd have had even better results if he trained for more speed at times in between marathon seasons). Hanson also believes this concept.

Don't misunderstand here. The marathon buildups should be very marathon specific in my opinion. The halfs would have their own unrelated specific training. Anyway, maybe you'll get something useful out of this thread.....

Idk -- depending on your goals -- qualify, run well, you probably want to race. A lot of people would do well with some 10k-half marathon blocks at that level. If you've already run decently fast, you're gonna want to race the marathon to get more comfortable at the distance.

I think the Hansons/NAZ do it right. Their marathoners run ~ 3 marathons every 2 years. So 1 block is reserved for 10k/half marathoning. Plus you're not in a marathon build year round.

I would train at altitude as you can't run in an altitude tent. The training "must be a secret" -Aouita.

Obviously you would do whatever your coach tells you.

Obviously you choose a coach who has proven success training Olympic-caliber or national-class runners.

Alternatively you could do your own trial-and-error method a couple times first. After two to three goes at it, it will only be 8-12 years later.

Forget about phase training , just keep on build the three main factors for the result paralell in a never ending way......

I was wondering whether this new name was the 4th handle used by the genuine Spamming Swede. I do see the strange spacing around punctuation, but when I've imitated the Wizard I've pulled that off pretty well. I'm actually hoping it is a fake who thinks itself funny.....