Piotr Woloszyn

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:

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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