Is it too late for me to ever break 3 hours? Advice please!

Yeah, it's to late for somebody like you.

You have never put the work in and you never will.

There is no easy path to a sub 3 Marathon unless you are super talented, which you are not.

Train for a Marathon and run one. After that we can look if sub 3 hours is possible for you.

But my educated guess is, that you won't even do that.

Get up to 16- to 20-mile long runs on the weekends or whatever day, then re-evaluate your plan.

It's not too late. But you've got to train. 10 mpw, is nothing. There are free training schedules online, like Hal Higdon's advanced marathon schedules. I've used those before. For my last marathon I used on of the schedules from Pete Pfitzinger's Advanced Marathoning book, which I liked a lot better. It's an easy find on Amazon and worse the cost.

I've run marathons on as little as (building up to) 55 miles per week. My last one, I peaked at 70 mpw. The more miles I've run, the faster my races have gone. I've heard of some people doing minimalist type schedules, like a build up to a final week with two 10 mile runs and one 20 mile run. Maybe it might work for you, but for me, if I don't do a lot more mileage than that, I bonk and crash the last 6 miles.

Try some shorter races, first. If you can go sub 40 in the 10K, and sub 1:27 in a half marathon, you're probably within striking distance.

Don't take advice from me, though. I'm still trying to break 3:00 myself. Hopefully this Spring we can both say we did.

^ I second the Hal Higdon Advanced plans. Those are pretty good beginner plans IMO.

Definitely not too late. If you van break 7 min pace on in a 10K with no real training then you definitely have the talent.

You need to build your mileage up to 50 miles a week... I don't mean 50 mile peak in a marathon training cycle, I mean 50 miles a week just about every week. Obviously 50 is an arbitrary number and more is better but ~50 at a minumum... to do that from 10 miles and not get hurt could take a year (depending how injury prone you actually are). Might need to cut back on the swimming or maybe you could get away with less mileage because of the swimming but you really need your get your legs used to being pounded otherwise they will not be able to handle a full marathon, especially if you want to get through it without getting hurt or having to take a prolonged recovery after.

Then hold 50 miles a week for about a year to develop your aerobic capacity and long run.

Then you're ready to run a marathon without totally trashing yourself.

Breaking 3:00 in your first marathon is probably too ambitious. A good floor goal would be to break 3:30 (sub 8 minute pace)... depending on how your training is and how things develop you can always raise the bar like 3:20, 3:15, 3:10, or of course 3:07!... Maybe you could even break 3 but you're more likely going to get hurt chasing that goal... start with something more attainable and then adjust if it makes sense.

Just depends on how much you want it... Your going to be running 6-7 hours a week four a couple years instead of 1-2 hours. It's a lot of work with no real payoff. Nobody cares if you break 3 in the marathon except yourself. Really need to decide what your priories are...

Marathonrunner wrote:

Yeah, it's to late for somebody like you.

You have never put the work in and you never will.

There is no easy path to a sub 3 Marathon unless you are super talented, which you are not.

Train for a Marathon and run one. After that we can look if sub 3 hours is possible for you.

But my educated guess is, that you won't even do that.

Why bother to write that? It's not justified or funny or anything. Just why?

First time marathon wrote:

What kind of mileage are we talking and how long would it take me to get there? Is there a preferred program for someone like me?

I second grabbing a copy of Advanced Marathoning by Pfitzinger/Douglas. It's got absolutely everything you need to hit your target. Based on what you posted, I suspect you could probably achieve decent results with the up to 55 miles per week 18 week schedule in the book (the plan starts at 32 miles per week and gradually increases to 55 miles, before entering a tapper phase).