Marathon Plans

Advanced

For an example of an advanced marathon plan, here is Scott-Thomas’s program for Taylor Murphy, leading to this year’s Ottawa Marathon. Scott-Thomas’s group of elite athletes include Canada’s best 5000m and 10,000m runners, some of whom are moving up the marathon. Non-elite runners looking to run a fast time, or to qualify for Boston, can follow a scaled-back version of this plan.  

While his athletes run up to 190K a week in preparation for a marathon, Scott-Thomas also focuses on nutrition, recovery and mental training. He recommends every marathoner practise race nutrition and hydration in training. “The marathon is long enough that I don’t think anybody can undertake it lightly,” says Scott-Thomas. “In fact, if you’re looking at people who are running four or five hours, the energy system that they use is quite different – and in a way more complex – than an advanced marathon runner. Your intake of calories and fuel during the competition is supercritical. You really need to practice that and be smart about it, otherwise you are going to hit the infamous bonk. And that’s painful and no fun.”

Scott-Thomas’s advanced marathon training program has three-week cycles, with two higher-volume weeks followed by a week with a 15 to 20 per cent drop in volume. The  taper – or reduction in training volume before the goal race – is shorter than many beginner or intermediate programs. Scott-Thomas is a firm believer in longer tempo workouts: “In general I would say a lot of training plans would have people going too short and too fast in the marathon,” he says. “So we’re often doing things like 70 minutes’ worth of tempo work.” A Sunday 32K run may include a 40-minute tempo and a 30-minute tempo session at, or slightly faster than, marathon race pace.

INSERT ADVANCED MARATHON TRAINING PLAN

SIDEBARS

Marathon wisdom from coach Dave Scott-Thomas

Mental training

In the last couple of years, mental training has become more practical, says coach Dave Scott-Thomas. For example, his athletes will run four times 5K on the road with three minutes jogging in between, visualizing each 5K repeat as a different stage of a marathon. “Today’s workout is designed to get you to that long lonely feeling that you have at the end of the race, physiologically, but also psychologically,” says Scott-Thomas”

Attitude

“A lot of people look at the marathon as a pretty daunting prospect … I look for the runner who says, `You know what, I am going to teach myself something, and it’s going to be awesome. I am going to push my comfort zone, I am going to step into some new turf where I haven’t been before, I am going to jump off the cliff to see if I have got wings.’” 

Nutrition

“We do a lot of practising with nutrition. And that goes to me being on the bike when we are doing some long runs with a knapsack full of gels and water bottles and whatnot … We found that Taylor Murphy for example wasn’t really adept at taking in water on the run. He swallowed a ton of air. We had to move to different types of water bottles.”

Embrace the beauty of the long run

When Taylor Murphy first started his marathon training program, the first couple of long runs felt interminable. “Then,” says Scott-Thomas, “he found that there is this real gentleness and beauty that comes from being a longer distance runner – a marathoner – where you’re just out there and listening to your body and feeling it. After a couple of months, Taylor came in and said, ‘You know what? I love those long runs.’” 

Margreet Dietz is a freelance author, journalist and marathoner based in Vancouver.