My 18 weeks training plan for the Berlin Marathon
The Berlin Marathon is only one week ahead. Everyone has an own goal for a marathon. Two current fastest long distance runners in the world: Duncan Kibet of Kenya and Haile Gebrselassie of Ethiopia will both try to run under the world record time Gebrselassie set here last year. For me, being just a human being, the goal for this marathon is to beat my Personal Best: 3h57m that I set in Paris earlier this year. In this post I wanted to share my training programme which I used for the last 18 weeks. I preceded this training with 2 weeks of non-structured running to help set in motion my legs which were suffering from ITBS at the time.
There is a ground rule that says that the more miles one does before a marathon the better finish time will be. Second ground rule says: don’t injure yourself! To be able to combine those conflicting rules we need to run often so the cumulative distance is adding up but still maintaining a reasonably low risk of injury. It is going to be my second marathon so I tried to leverage experience from the preparation for the first one. I knew what I could improve. In the first one my training was based only on the Long Weekend Runs and supplemented by non strictly running activities: squash, football etc. I think my total running mileage for entire training was something around 200km done during 12 weeks. It’s is really low and looking back I don’t know how I managed to finish under 4h mark. Learning from that I decided to introduce more often runs and settled on 5 times a week plus added 6 weeks to the duration of the training to enable building distance slowly and gradually. The overall structure of the training is similar to many others: there are 3 types of runs: short, medium and long and the distance is gradually growing until the long run gets to 32km (20 miles) around 4 weeks before marathon. With 5 runs I stuck to: 2 short, 2 medium, 1 long and decided to do two runs with the maximum distance 32km (4 and 6 weeks before the race). Not being able to quit all my social/sport activities I added on top of that 5-a-side football and squash, once a week each. I think it supplements the speed training which I didn’t want to introduce this time round yet. Every couple of weeks of increased work load there is a rest week with decreased distance that gives us the recovery time.
You can find details of the marathon training plan outlined in the table below. I prefer a countdown numbering so the training starts with week 18 and finishes with week 1:
| Week | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thur | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 18 | squash | football + 4,5km | 7,5km | 4,5km | rest | 7,5km | 12km |
| Week 17 | squash | football + 4,5km | 7,5km | 4,5km | rest | 7,5km | 13,5km |
| Week 16 | squash | football + 4,5km | 7,5km | 4,5km | rest | 7,5km | 9km |
| Week 15 | squash | football + 4,5km | 9km | 4,5km | rest | 9km | 16km |
| Week 14 | squash | football + 4,5km | 9km | 4,5km | rest | 9km | 18km |
| Week 13 | squash | football + 4,5km | 7,5km | 4,5km | rest | 9km | 13,5km |
| Week 12 | squash | football + 6km | 10km | 6km | rest | 10km | 21km |
| Week 11 | squash | football + 6km | 10km | 6km | rest | 10km | 22,5km |
| Week 10 | squash | football + 6km | 7,5km | 6km | rest | 10km | 16km |
| Week 9 | squash | football + 6km | 12km | 6km | rest | 12km | 25km |
| Week 8 | squash | football + 7,5km | 12km | 7,5km | rest | 12km | 27km |
| Week 7 | squash | football + 7,5km | 7,5km | 7,5km | rest | 12km | 21km |
| Week 6 | squash | football + 7,5km | 12km | 7,5km | rest | 7,5km | 32km |
| Week 5 | squash | football + 7,5km | 7,5km | 7,5km | rest | 12km | 20km |
| Week 4 | squash | football + 7,5km | 12km | 7,5km | rest | 7,5km | 32km |
| Week 3 | squash | football + 7,5km | 9km | 7,5km | rest | 6km | 18km |
| Week 2 | rest | 6km | 7,5km | 6km | rest | 4,5km | 12km |
| Week 1 | rest | 4,5km | 6km | rest | rest | 3km | RACE |
As you can see I haven’t followed the plan entirely due to different reasons. For instance I missed completely week 17 due to my injury, another due to travel and holidays. Regardless of that I am very happy with my preparation so far. As long as it’s a cold not flue which prevented me from going for a run this week. Some overall stats to date:
Count: 60 activities
Distance: 607.59 km
Time: 55:48:37 h:m:s
Average speed: 10.9 km/h
Average heart rate: 149 bpm
Calories: 48,591 C
There will be a follow up post about how to keep in shape when doing multiple marathons as in next 5 weeks I’m planning to run:
1. Berlin Marathon - 20th of September 2009
2. Royal Parks Half Marathon in London - 11th of October 2009
3. Frankfurt Marathon - 25th of October 2009
As you can see I will need a bit of luck to get through all of that without an injury. Keep your fingers crossed.
Ah, I almost forgot. Predicted time for Berlin: 3h49min.
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