marathon training – Two Degrees of Separation

After finishing the Melbourne Marathon last year, a surprising number of people told me that they secretly harboured dreams of running a marathon, and did I have any tips? Now clearly, having only run two marathons, ‘tips’ are about as much as I can offer…but having only done two marathons, I’m probably better placed to remember what it’s like to think about tackling your first marathon than someone who has done a lot of them. And anyway, this blog is free, so at worst, you’ll get what you paid for!
So here are my tips for training for your first marathon:

This is the look of a man who beat his goal time, got a negative split, AND found his family after finishing!

Train for it like it’s your second marathon

Roughly 80% of your first marathon will be spent worrying that you won’t be able to make the distance. Whereas, with your second marathon you can actually spend a little more time taking in the experience of the run (apart from the final 7kms…that’s a real shit-show!) So, as much as possible, know that if you do the training, you can make the distance…and start from there.

Start early

As I furiously touch every piece of wood around me, I can say that I’ve trained for both of my marathons without suffering a serious injury, and I’m pretty sure that’s because I gave myself a lot of time to get my body ready. I did my first marathon as part of my training for an Ironman, and so I had done 10 months of training for it by the time I got there. For my second marathon I trained for just under 4 months, but I had been running at least once a week prior to this.
If you’ve only been running occasionally, or only running shorter distances (5 – 10 kms), then your body is going to have to do a lot of adapting to the increased workload, so make sure you give it plenty of time.

Get a coach

A coach will layout a training program that will get you ready. A coach will adapt training to your circumstances, but will also be that voice in your ear that gets you out of of bed on those cold, early mornings (although I did pay extra to get my coach to break into my house and whisper ‘Get out of bed’ each morning…you may simply use will-power), and a coach is there to answer all those questions that pop up along the way. One of my clearest memories of my first marathon is chatting to my coach on the day before and asking ‘So, do I need to put band-aids on my nipples to stop chaffing?’ and him saying ‘Oh mate, YES!’ (ladies, you’ll be fine…but fellas, it’s not until you see a guy with patches of red soaking through their t-shirt where their nipples are that you realise just how much you can chaff over 42kms!)
I’ve had two coaches (one for the Ironman and one for the marathon last year), and they have both been fantastic in different ways. The most important thing is that they know what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it. For the marathon last year I worked with Amanda Meggison (who I HIGHLY recommend) and I explained that I wanted to run a sub 4hr marathon, that I wanted to include other sports in my training (ie swimming, cycling and gym) and that I wanted to involve my family wherever possible. Amanda developed a program that did exactly that!

A good coach should appear at about the 24km mark of the marathon, have a chat while you run…then take a selfie!

By the numbers

This really depends on your personality, but I found that having a record of my runs really helped. I’ve got a Garmin watch, so I could see my pace, heart-rate, time and distance for each run. A LOT of the changes you will see are incremental, and often so small that you don’t actually notice them…but if you have an actual record of each run, then you can see them over time.
Hitting daily and weekly goals is also a remarkably good motivator.

Have testicles

If you’re combining your training with a full-time job, or a family, or indeed – both. Then you’re going to find it really hard to get big sessions done during the 9-5 day. So you will have to look at running early in the morning, or once the kids are in bed. This is actually incredibly therapeutic! You get to see sunrises as you run along empty bike paths, and see how cities change after dark. I’ve had the pleasure of running for hours in National Parks and on country roads where I might only see 1 or 2 other people, and do you know how many times I’ve feared for my safety…not once! In fact it wasn’t until I was chatting to a few female runners about an evening run and they simply said ‘Oh, I don’t feel safe running by myself at night’ that I realised how much I had simply taken this for granted.
Now I’m not saying that women can’t or shouldn’t run by themselves, I’m just saying that as a man, it didn’t even factor into my calculations. In fact, soon after having this realisation, I was running early one morning in Northcote when I saw a young woman on the path in front of me, and I was suddenly left wondering ‘Do I keep my distance, or is that going to be creepy? Do I run closer to her and act as a Guardian Angel (knowing full well that from her perspective, some creepy guy is now running REALLY close to her and looking smug)? Do I run past her and give her as wide a berth as possible, or yell something as I approach so as not to give her a fright?’ It was really fraught…for about 8 seconds, then I realised that she was actually a LOT faster than me and she disappeared into the distance.
But seeing as I don’t really have any advice to pass on here, I would love to hear from female runners about how they deal with this.

Headphones

You’re already 1,000 words into this blog and I’ll bet you’re pretty sick of me already…well just imagine having to listen to this as an internal monologue 24 hours a day! Believe me, it’s not pleasant. So I am a massive advocate for listening to something as you run, whether it’s music, or podcasts or audiobooks…just make sure you can also hear the world around you.

Consistency is key

The biggest difference between preparing for my first marathon and my second, was my willingness to listen to my body, and take a break if I had to. With my first marathon, if I could feel a cold coming on, I would often ignore it and hope that by training I could fight it off. Invariably this meant that I would get a day or two more training in, and then crash hard with whatever illness I had hoped to avoid and miss multiple days of training…then try desperately to make this up as soon as I felt better, and fatigue myself so that I was vulnerable to getting sick, and then repeat the process.
For this marathon prep, if I felt like I had a cold coming on, I was willing to take a day or two off and let my body fight it. While this meant I did miss a day or two of training, I was able to bounce back quickly and not have to panic about making up for multiple days of training. The result was I had much better consistency, and my fitness and pace improved in line with that.

Race when you can

I remember doing a group training session for the Ironman where we did some sprints, and one the guys next to me said ‘I signed up for an Ironman so I didn’t have to do this fast stuff anymore!’ If you’ve signed up for a marathon, you probably feel the same…and if you’ve never been much of a runner, you’re probably not all that keen on racing against anyone. But the other big difference between my first and second marathons was the number of races I did as part of the training. I signed up for the Rapid Ascent Trail Running series and it was amazing, but any of the Sri Chinmoy runs, or a Park Run or just a local fun run, is a really good way to push yourself and see what you’re capable of. I guarantee that you will get something out of every race you do, even if it’s just the experience of having a complete stranger cheer you on!

So there you go, all the information you could ever want on running your first marathon…you are now morally obliged to go and run one!

They say that ‘life is a marathon, not a sprint’…and this is because it takes a lot consistent effort to do it well, it costs more than you think it should, and there is always the risk that if things don’t go well, you will shit yourself in public. Nevertheless, I’ve signed up to do this year’s Melbourne Marathon. This will be my third marathon, although the second one doesn’t really count as it was at the end of an Ironman, and was more of a glorified stroll from Frankston to St Kilda as I tried valiantly to keep my food down, and ideally, stop vomiting blood. So I’m not a newbie…but I still don’t consider myself a ‘runner’. In fact if I think about running, there are three memories that jump to mind immediately.
The first is being at school athletics carnival when I was in about Grade 2 and running in a relay, I was running next to a kid who I thought was the slowest in our grade (shout out to Daniel Grover) and he started to pass me, and I remember having the choice of putting in all of my effort and trying to get back past him (and of course running the risk of still not beating him), or just ease off and let him go past, but not have to put my pride on the line by trying and failing. I heroically chose the second option, and I’ve never really forgiven myself.
The second memory is going for morning runs on school camp at Buxton when I must have been 12 or 13 and always being in the last couple of kids who would make it to wherever the faster kids had had to wait while we caught up. I was usually the lone skinny kid amongst the chubby kids…and I always felt the guy that ran the camp (shout out to Johnny ‘Bloody’ Malcolm) had a special look of ‘I’m not angry, just disappointed’ that he saved just for me.
Man I hated running.
But then my third memory was from when I was training for the Ironman and saw that I had a 21km run to do on the weekend, and my first thought was ‘so that’s 2 hours I’ll have to set aside’. Not ‘Oh dear God! How the hell am I going to run 21kms?!!!’ or ‘How can I get out of this?’ There is an incredible feeling that comes with doing sufficient training to see 21kms as an allocation of time, rather than a major challenge. So a big motivator for attempting the marathon this year was trying to get back to being that fit…plus I’m 42 and the marathon is 42kms…so there was that too. I’m now less than a week out, and now seems as good a time as any to go through what I’ve learnt this time around.
So I’m no expert but here are a few things I’ve learnt about training for a marathon.

Be like Kim Novell

Ask yourself ‘Who is actually going to come out on the day of the marathon and watch me run?’ This is the exact number of people who are sufficiently interested in the fact that you’re running a marathon that you should post about it on Facebook or Instagram each time you train…and you’re going to be sitting around the dinner table with them tonight…so keep the #crazyrunner #marathontraining #longrun stuff to an absolute minimum.
Unless of course you’re writing a blog about it…in which case…shine on you crazy diamond!

‘Yeah, a marathon is tough, but have you heard of…’

For some people the thought of running 5kms seems impossible, for some people the thought of doing 10kms or a half marathon seems impossible, and for a lot of people the thought of running a full marathon seems impossible. If you’re running a marathon, then you have probably already proved to yourself that the first three aren’t impossible, and so you should have a sense of achievement…and once you’ve done a marathon, my God…you’ll never have to listen to someone else talk about their achievements again! But sadly, no. There are ultra-marathons, 100km runs, 100 mile runs, 100 mile runs up hills, multi day events, the 79km hop* and people will talk to you about these, and it will feel like they’re trying to diminish your achievement. But don’t let it. Just remember, you set yourself a challenge, you worked hard, and you achieved it. That’s awesome. If other people want to set themselves other challenges, then so be it, but you can only control what you do…and you’ve done something amazing.

*This may not actually be a thing.

Fingers and toes

When you think about training for a marathon you probably think about how sore your legs are going to be…and believe me they do get pretty sore…but the true victims for this campaign have been my fingers and toes.
For any run over 15kms I am now having to tape up most of my toes to stop them inflicting damage on each other. My little toe on my left foot now has a callous so sharp that it actually cuts the toe next to it…and the little toe on my right foot has decided that having a toe-nail is optional and so has done away with it altogether. Meanwhile, my big toes have conspired to poke their toenails through the tops of my shoes and the remaining toes appear to decided to use their toenails to attack the toes next to them.
But at least my toes have the decency to be hidden by socks and shoes at all times. On the other hand (*zing!*) my fingers have decided to react to the regime of early morning winter runs by developing chilblains. Yes, chilblains. You know those things that along with scurvy and ‘the vapours’ you thought were eradicated in 1800s. Well they weren’t and I’m living proof. When I started to get lumps on my fingers I made the logical assumption, ‘I have hand cancer!’, but it turns out that, much like the 79km hop, that’s not actually a thing. Then I remembered a TV jingle for socks in the 80s that mentioned chilblains, did some online research…voila! Chilblains! I also realise that basing my medical advice on a TV jingle and Google is the sort of approach that has health professionals across the country smacking their heads into desks and saying ‘Why do we bother?…Why do we bother?’ But to them I say ‘We don’t need expertise anymore, we have the internet! Facts are boring and uniformed opinions are FUN! Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a rather important ‘Mr. Squiggle was a flat-Earther conspiracy’ rabbit-hole to fall down.’

The bare necessities

One of the great thing about running (as opposed to cycling for example) is that you pretty much just need a pair of runners and you’re good to go (as opposed to just needing a bike, shoes, helmet, cycling kit, socks that are the correct height, a power meter, a second bike [for Cyclocross/commuting/whatever excuse you can come up with], new set of carbon wheels, etc). However, if you are training for a marathon, there are a few other things things that I think you should invest in:

A coach – a coach will design a program that suits your situation (level of fitness, time commitments, goals) and will keep you motivated. There were a few times when people would ask what I had planned for the weekend, and I would say ‘I have to do a 32km run on Sunday’ and they would reply ‘Well, you don’t HAVE to do a 32km run!’ and I would laugh and say ‘Yeah, I guess.’ But deep down I was thinking ‘But what would Amanda say if I didn’t?! She would be both angry AND disappointed!’
I’ve had two coaches (one for the Ironman and one for this marathon) and they have both been excellent. So find someone you click with and get a program done…and if you’re looking for a personal recommendation, Amanda Meggison at Planted Life is fantastic!

A device – A Garmin, a Fitbit, an Apple watch, whatever…just make sure it can give you your heart rate, pace and distance. This will help you track how your fitness is progressing, let you know what your pace is while you’re running…and most importantly provide you with the stats you will need to gloat on social media / justify eating that second serve of French Toast.
For me on this campaign I have been amazed that the running hasn’t gotten any easier…but the times have gotten faster. If I was going on ‘gut-feel’ I think I would have given up a while ago.

Headphones – You are going to be spending a LOT of time by yourself, and unless you want to hear hours of your internal monologue saying ‘This sucks, this sucks, this sucks’, then headphones + podcasts are the way to go.
However, this will leave you with the quandary of whether to wear them when you do the actual marathon. This is a bit of tricky one for me. On the one hand, changing a key thing that you’ve done in every training session when you do the actual race is stupidity 101, and Lord knows it make life a lot easier if you’ve got a banging 4hr playlist to get you through the tough times. But on the other hand, I think that part of the challenge with any endurance event is that extended conversation you have with yourself through the really tough times…the mental toughness required for a marathon is just as important as the physical conditioning…so if you wear headphones, are you actually diminishing the challenge? I don’t know…but I have decided not to wear headphones when I run the marathon…and I expect to spend close to 4 hours regretting that decision.

Timing’s everything

Much like having a child or doing your tax return, there’s never really a ‘right time’ to do a marathon. You just kinda have to commit to it, and then start training. Having said that, having a two week holiday in Tasmania three weeks out from the marathon is either the smartest thing I could have done…or the dumbest. It’s surprisingly hard to find the time to sneak in a few long runs while on the road. But by the same token, it’s pretty hard to find 8 hours of sleep every night during my normal routine. So I’m feeling rested…I just hope I’m not TOO rested.

Also, having your heaviest training load coincide with work hitting bat-shit crazy levels of busy is really not fun…especially if you’re having to work long days knowing that you still have to get home and get a run in. At the same time, having a physical outlet for all of the frustration is pretty damned therapeutic.

So there you go, a few of the things I’ve learnt this time around. I’m confident that I will be able to get a sub 4-hour time, but from memory, I was equally confident of running sub 4-hour time last time as well, and that didn’t pan out as I had hoped (4hrs 11mins for those keeping score). But rest assured, I will do a brief race report afterwards to work out what actually worked and what didn’t…but in the meantime, I’m going to eat everything in sight and secretly pray for rain on race day.

A very muddy day on the trails at Westerfolds Park

If you would like to donate to the JMB Foundation please head here: https://melbournemarathon2018.everydayhero.com/au/chris-riordan and if the link doesn’t work, just send them some money anyway, they do great work!

Tag: marathon training

Running your second marathon