Marathon training on 4 days/week

I'd do 15 either tuesday or thursday, if you can. A marathon is going to suck on this mileage. You're looking at at least 4.5 to 5 hours, based on your half times.

Personally, if that is all I could commit, I would just stick to races half and below, but you'll be able to finish a marathon.

Yes it is possible to run a solid marathon on 4 days a week. The knuckleheads here will claim you need 80 mpw but I personally BQ'd off of 25 mpw.

I would change things out.

Tues. MP runs and try to build to 13 (treadmill is still fine for these efforts). These will be the most important runs.

Thurs- Not sure progression runs are really need. I've found that simply running the last 2-3 miles at GMP or faster teaches you the same than with less effort.

Sat- I would make these my easy easy easy easy

Sun- Long Run don't have to be hard but they shouldn't be easy.

I would try to add strides 1-2 days a week.

Dude you ran sub-2 half off minimal training, you'll be better off than 99% of the hobbyjoggers following Hal Higdon and walking it in. 4:5-5 is a ridiculous estimate assuming you actually carry out your entire training plan, I think 3:45-4:15 is a better guess.

Some suggestions - finish weight training 15 minutes faster on Mondays and Fridays and do a 2-3 mile easy jog on the treadmill afterwards. Agree on bumping up one of the midweek runs to at least 12 miles. Keep Saturdays easy before the long run. If you do 4 18+ mile long runs and hit 40+ mpw for the bulk of your plan you'll be in decent shape for the marathon, and will probably cut off a massive amount from your half time. Good luck.

24 hours in a day and 3 of those days you can’t fit in 30 minutes of running?

No need for down weeks since you’re only running 4 days a week.

Up the quality. Since you don’t like intervals turn every run into a tempo/steady. Start off slow and as you warm up drop the pace. If you get tired slow down a half mile and pick it back up. If still tired just call it and do the rest easy. Feeling good? Rip the last 1-2 miles.

My first marathon was 3:36 in San Francisco (hilly) off Hal Higdon's beginner plan, which is much like you describe. But at the time I was pretty physically active and rode my bike everywhere which kinda substituted for a lot of easy miles. Now that I am more sedentary outside of running (and older) I find that I need a lot more easy running to not get injured.

I run pretty much like your schedule, except hard effort run Tuesday and long run Saturday. Easy run Sunday and medium effort Thursday or Friday.

Just ran 3:09 off this general training at 45 years old. I try for 5 days, but rarely get it done.

60mpw is better, but 40 will get it done.

I have a friend got a top ten finish at Boston in the mid 70s on three or four days a week and no intervals. He did a 20 on the weekend and a couple 10s at something like his marathon pace. Some weeks he'd do another 10 or sometimes a pretty hard 5.

If you look at what guys did before WWII you'll find a lot of four day a week runners. It was commonly believed that running was hard on your heart so they'd only run every other day.

Ya, but that was junk science. Look at how times dramatically improved. If op is going to train 4 days a week and no more, great, better than doing nothing. Lets just not pretend it could be the ideal way to approach a marathon.

Did I say it was an ideal way to approach a marathon? But most people running marathons today would be very happy to get the results these guys did even if a more ideal approach got them a bit faster time. And by the way, my friend who got the top ten finish at Boston had a good stretch of time when he trained more "ideally," double sessions, hundred mile weeks, etc. He progressed from 2:17 on three or four days a week to 2:26 with more ideal training.

Why not try to improve at the shorter distances before you move up to the marathon?

The very small amount of training you're doing won't be as big of an issue at 5k, and it will allow you to at least build some sort of a base before tackling the marathon.

You're free to do what you want, but it just screams of unchecked ego when you jump straight ahead to the "glamour event" that is the marathon.

Agree with some of what has been said. Would try to up the running to 5-6 days/week, even if it's just an easy 3 miles on the lifting days. Frequency matters. As far as intervals go, marathon training intervals should be specific to the distance. Maybe you don't like running a hard 5 x 1k workout @ 5k effort but in marathon training, for you, maybe that's 8-10 x 1k @ T on short rest. Working closer to half marathon pace. Alternate that kind of a session with the MP workouts. I would even do the MP workouts every 3 weeks and you can also stick that in your long run every so often.

You don’t need an easy week every 3-4 weeks. 4 days a week is already accomplishing that. Otherwise this looks ok. I would probably swap Thursday and make it Tuesday, make Tuesday Saturday and make Saturday Thursday.

Bernie Allen. It's hard to say what training he was really doing because the Brits are sometimes reticent about their programs. Eg Coe was only running 40 mpw at his peak but he forgot to count warmups, cooldowns, and morning runs.

It's a cultural thing. Some good runners will spell out the details of their plan and give it to you, but the Brits were definitely not like that in that era. Allen easily could have been doing double that mileage and we wouldn't know about it. Even if you search Letsrun you'll see different versions of this story with different mileage totals.

There is a strong correlation between endurance training hours/week and marathon end time.

So OP if you understand that concept, you can act accordingly.

Lifting 2 times a week is not needed for long distance running. -> replace one day with endurance session

Tuesday: Quality

In general the body will adapt best to what it does most often, so if possible a 5th or 6th day of even a short 3-4 mile easy run is very beneficial to your efficiency.

But if 4 days is all you can do I would focus on 1 main quality workout mid-week (Thu) and a long run on the weekend (Sun). And make Tue and Sat easy distance.

Would NOT recommend doing tempo work on Saturday followed by a Sunday long run.

Happy Running

AT

Don’t do it.
After that woman talk show host strolled the Marine Corp Marathon all kinds of common people feel entitled to enter a marathon. It’s a competitive foot race that sadly has been dumbed down. If you do not have the time and determination to do the specific work, after several years of building an aerobic foundation, do not bother.

Right. But it's not hard for me to say what training he was really doing. I lived with him at times and did a fair amount of it with him.

hey trevor - let me let you in on a little secret - theres this norweigan runner called jakob ingebrigtsen and he has a secret training weapon called threshold. strava dm me if you want to be fast...

Thanks for all the awesome replies. Going to make the following changes. This means I'll start at 34mpw and build up to 53mpw during peak weeks.

• Tuesday: 6 ---> 10 miles @ goal MP
• Thursday: 8 ---> 12 miles easy w/strides
• Friday: 3 ---> 4 miles easy
• Saturday: 5 ---> 7 miles easy
• Sunday: 12 ---> 20 miles, with the last 1/3 @ MP

I can't cut out my lifting sessions since I want to keep my gainz (currently benching 225 for reps as an example).