The principles of modern marathon training

This article is adapted from my new book, Marathon Excellence for Everyone, which is available now on Amazon.

If you are trying to run a good marathon, not just get to the finish line, how should you train? That was the question I set out to answer when I started coaching marathoners over 12 years ago.

The complete answer to that question deserves (and gets) a full book-length treatment, but in this article, I want to distill the modern approach to marathon training down to its most essential core principles.

What is our goal in marathon training?

The basic proposition of the marathon is simple: our goal is to run 26.2 miles as fast as possible. Doing so requires a very specific set of physiological, biomechanical, and psychological capabilities. We need to build up these capabilities step by step, respecting the underlying principles of proper training.

Proper training for the marathon has many facets and details, but the broad strokes can be understood through five simple principles:

1. Marathon fitness has physiological roots
2. Training is specific
3. Improvement comes from stress and recovery
4. Every speed has a place in training
5. Great marathons don’t happen by accident

Let’s take a closer look at how each of these principles translate into your day-to-day training decisions.

Principle 1. Marathon fitness has physiological roots

Running is an extraordinarily ancient activity, and your body has a well-developed suite of physiological and biomechanical systems that support your ability to run. As a result, the raw state of your body puts strong constraints on your performance in the marathon.

There are four independent components of marathon fitness: maximal oxygen uptake (VO₂max), maximal metabolic steady-state (SSmax, pronounced “steady-state max”), running economy, and physiological resilience. These components form a tightly coupled system that determines your fitness for the marathon:

• VO₂max determines your highest possible aerobic power output.
• SSmax determines the highest fraction of VO2max that you can sustain without an out-of-control increase in fatigue.
• Running economy determines how efficiently you can convert metabolic power into forward motion.
• Resilience determines to what degree the other components of fitness (i.e., your VO2max, SSmax, and running economy) deteriorate over the length of the marathon.

The fastest speed you can sustain for the marathon is the product—in the literal, mathematical sense—of these four factors. To perform better in the marathon, your training must improve each of these components of fitness.

Improving the physiological roots of each component of fitness

Each of these components of marathon fitness is in turn determined by a specific set of underlying cellular mechanisms—its physiological roots—that can be improved with targeted workouts:

VO2max can be improved with interval sessions at 10k to 5k pace to boost the oxygen-carrying capacity of your blood and increase the size and strength of your heart.

SSmax can be improved with a mix of easy mileage, long intervals, and fast continuous runs across a wide range of speeds that target the oxygen-extraction and lactate shuttling capabilities of your muscles.

Running economy can be improved with consistent, high-volume training and workouts at high-end aerobic speeds to foster more efficient muscle recruitment patterns.

Physiological resilience can be improved with marathon-specific workouts that bolster your resistance against glycogen depletion, muscle damage, and central fatigue.

Good training should incorporate all of these elements to ensure that you aren’t neglecting any of the four components of fitness. Some of these mechanisms might seem a little technical, but don’t worry—you don’t need to understand all of the physiology; you just need to do the right kind of workouts.

Can you change your physiology?

Many people subconsciously associate the phrase “physiological roots” with things about your body that you cannot change.^[1] When it comes to marathon fitness, though, we’re specifically interested in the biological aspects of your body that can adapt and change in response to training. Your heart, bloodstream, muscles, mitochondrial networks, and even your tendons and joints are all organic systems that adapt and change in response to the stimuli that they experience.

Physiology is not everything—but it’s not nothing

We should also keep in mind that your marathon performance is not wholly determined by your raw fitness.

Motivation, force of will, and strength of spirit play an enormous role in how close you can push yourself to your physical limit, and developing these capabilities must also be a part of training. But lifting your physical limits as high as possible through focused training interventions is an essential precursor to great marathon performance, and you neglect the physiological roots of performance at your peril.

Principle 2. Training is specific

Why does the marathon humble so many runners who have impressive credentials in the 5k, 10k, or half marathon? Often, it’s because they do not use marathon-specific workouts to prepare for the specific demands of the race.

Some elements of training, like easy mileage, strides, and workouts targeting SSmax, are “general,” in that they influence performance across a wide range of distances. However, running a great marathon requires more than just being a generally fit runner. You need to specialize your fitness for the demands of the marathon.

Specializing your fitness for the marathon

How, exactly, do you go about specializing for the marathon? Well, first you need to build up a base of general fitness, then leverage that fitness to do marathon-specific workouts: long training sessions at speeds very close to marathon pace.

Moreover, these workouts should be specific for the actual race that you’re preparing for: on flat, fast courses if you’re training for Chicago or London; through rolling hills if you’re training for Boston or New York City; or in the heat of the day if you’re training for Mumbai, Singapore, or Honolulu.

However, you can’t just jump into doing long and fast workouts right away—your body and your mind aren’t ready. First, you must train not for the marathon itself, but for doing marathon-specific workouts.

The need to build up your ability to do marathon-specific workouts induces a sort of second-order specificity: in addition to a base of general fitness, you also need strong capabilities at marathon-supportive speeds, which span from ten percent faster than marathon pace to ten percent slower than marathon pace.

You might wonder if this same principle of building out supportive fitness applies recursively to marathon-supportive speeds, and indeed, it does! Your ability to do marathon-supportive training is in turn supported by your general fitness, which spans a broad range of speeds both faster and slower than marathon pace.

Principle 3. Every speed has a place in training

This idea of building out support for marathon-specific workouts using a series of speeds fractionally faster and slower than marathon pace leads us to the idea of the ladder of support: an ascending scale of paces, from very slow to very fast, where each pace is a foothold that provides speed and endurance support for the slower and faster speeds adjacent to it.

The concept of speed and endurance support is what’s missing from training programs that focus solely on a few “magic paces” or just a handful of “training zones.”

These kinds of approaches, which are common in traditional marathon training approaches, leave large gaps in the ladder of support: even though you can improve your general fitness with high-speed intervals or long, slow runs, it’s hard to translate these improvements into performance in the marathon—the speeds you train at are too far from marathon pace, and you have no training sessions to serve as a bridge between short, fast sessions and long, slow ones. You need training that spans the full spectrum of speeds.

Modern marathon periodization: general, supportive, specific

To build out this ladder of support, it’s far better to use a three-phase training approach, based on periodization methods pioneered by Renato Canova, Luciano Gigliotti, and other members of the “Italian school” of marathon training.

In the modern approach to the marathon, training begins not with a long base phase of pure easy mileage, but with a general phase which improves the individual components of marathon fitness using workouts across a wide range of speeds, both faster and slower than marathon pace.

Then, in the marathon-supportive phase, the distribution of workouts shifts to more strongly emphasize speeds within ten percent of marathon pace—especially endurance at 90% of marathon pace (MP), and speed at 110% MP.^[2]

Finally, in the marathon-specific phase, training shifts again to focus on long and fast workouts within five percent of marathon pace (i.e. 95–105% MP) to complete the process of specializing your fitness for the marathon.

This progression towards marathon-specific speeds is illustrated visually in the figure below:

The idea in this figure is that your training volume at each pace is represented by the width of the black bars, similar to the volume meter or spectrogram in a music or podcasting app.

As the marathon draws closer, your distribution of workouts shifts to put greater emphasis on marathon pace (100% MP) and its immediate neighbors on the ladder of support. Each phase of training has a different distribution of training intensities and a different set of physiological goals.

The connection between marathon science and marathon periodization

This progression from general training to marathon-supportive training and finally marathon-specific training gives us a framework for targeting each of the four components of marathon fitness.

The general phase uses the full spectrum of speeds to lift VO2max and SSmax, the marathon-supportive phase uses speeds closer to marathon pace to improve running economy and continue improving SSmax, and the marathon-specific phase strengthens your resilience to allow you to sustain marathon pace for the full distance of the race.

Even though the ladder of support is a conceptual model developed by top coaches and athletes through observation and experience, it should not be surprising that it closely corresponds to the training strategy suggested by a careful examination of the physiological roots of marathon fitness.

After all, coaches and athletes are scientists in their own way, conducting experiments in the laboratory of the real world, with the most effective training methods emerging over time through relentless training and competition.

Principle 4. Improvement comes from stress and recovery

Right now, whether you’re totally sedentary or in world-class shape, your body is adapted to meet a certain level of physical challenge. To improve, you need to expose your body to a new challenge that pushes it to increase its capabilities.

This new challenge can’t be too potent; otherwise, you’ll overwhelm your ability to recover. Nor can it be too small: something insufficiently novel or challenging won’t induce any changes in your body. But, with the right stimulus and the right amount of recovery, you can gradually improve your fitness.

As your fitness grows, so too will your ability to adapt and improve following longer, faster workouts. Training, then, is a careful dance: if you don’t continually introduce new training stimuli, your fitness will stagnate.

This is why it’s a mistake to continue to do the same workouts at the same speeds over and over again: you need a new stimulus to improve. However, if you don’t pair greater stress with greater recovery, your body won’t be able to adapt.

On a day-to-day basis, the principle of stress and recovery means that different workouts will require different amounts of recovery afterwards. Lower-volume, effort-based workouts may only require a single day of easy to moderate running afterwards, and sometimes, you can even do low-key sessions like a progression run and a long easy run back-to-back.

Modulation in training: bigger stress, bigger recovery

As your workouts become longer and faster, you need to take additional days of easier running to recover—this is Renato Canova’s principle of “modulation.”

As an extreme example, elite marathoners will sometimes take five or six days of easy to moderate running between their most intense marathon-specific sessions. These same principles apply even if you’re not an elite runner: your longest and fastest workouts require much more rest and recovery than a low-key early-season workout.

In keeping with the principle of stress and recovery, you’ll need to progressively increase the variability of your day-to-day volume and intensity as you get further into marathon training. Even if your weekly mileage stays more or less the same, you should change the distribution of volume and intensity within the week.

When building up your general fitness, you can run consistently high daily mileage, with your workout intensity distributed fairly evenly throughout the week.

As your training becomes more focused on marathon-supportive and eventually marathon-specific workouts, volume and intensity should become more concentrated into long and fast training sessions, with several days of much easier running afterwards to recover and improve.

Improvement is not just about doing the same workout faster

Improvement comes in many forms. Running the same workout at a faster pace is the most obvious one, but it’s not the only way to measure progress.

As the marathon draws closer, we’ll be increasingly interested in your ability to run the same pace for longer, or improving your ability to extend the same pace for a greater distance within a workout—for example, by moving from 8 × 1 km to 4 × 2 km at the same pace.

This strategy yields much more rapid improvements than repeating the same workouts over and over, and a lower biomechanical training load too.

Principle 5. Great marathons don’t happen by accident

Pulling off a great marathon requires getting a lot of things right: pacing, fueling, navigating hills, and accounting for environmental conditions. Your race is far more likely to succeed if you’ve made a careful but adaptable plan.

The right way to approach your race plan is with a practical and analytical mindset. While no individual piece of a race plan is make-or-break, a comprehensive plan that optimizes your pacing, fueling, race tactics, and course strategy can make an enormous difference.

Race plans should focus on getting the big picture right—optimizing the details where possible, but not fretting over minor issues that are outside of your control. The marathon is long enough that something is bound to go awry, no matter how careful your planning.

As such, your race plan needs to be flexible, adaptable, and potentially even ignorable, if the situation calls for it. Part of planning for the marathon is being ready to roll with the punches that come your way on race day.

Knowing when to adapt or even abandon your race plan is a skill that comes with practice: early on in your career as a marathoner, you’ll hew more closely to your race plan, checking your splits often and trusting your pre-planned race strategy.

As you get more experienced, you’ll develop an intuitive sense for pacing, tactics, and course strategy, allowing you to make looser, more flexible race plans that bake in your ability to make mid-race judgment calls.

Most of all: you must be pragmatic with your training

Training principles are important, but remember our overarching goal: to run 26.2 miles as fast as possible. This must be our North Star in training.

The running world is perfused with a variety of other goals, often attached to ideals or dogma. Some people consider themselves paleo runners, minimalist runners, old-school runners, high-mileage runners, streak runners, or scientific runners, and they feel very strongly about their attachment to these ideologies.

However, you can’t let ideology get in the way of your goal. Sometimes the right tool in training is going to be a sports drink, a pair of super shoes, a double threshold workout, a down week, a day off, or a workout where you ignore the watch. We must always be pragmatic, seeing and analyzing the current situation as it actually is, not how we might want it to be.

Why these principles of marathon training matter

You might wonder: if you have a good training plan, can’t you just follow it and not worry about the underlying principles? This strategy will work…but only if your training unfolds exactly as planned.

In reality, it’s almost certain that you’ll have to adapt, adjust, or rework your training on the fly—whether because of travel, illness, injury, weather, or any of the many other factors that can throw a wrench into your training plan.

Adapting your training schedule is a necessary part of marathon preparations, so it’s essential to have some foundational principles to rely on when you have to make judgment calls.

There’s an art to improvement, centered around learning to run fast without running hard, that can’t quite be captured in a calendar or written into a schedule.

That’s why when I’m writing about training, I also try to include stories, anecdotes, and aphorisms that, together, paint a picture of what your mindset should look like. See my article on psychological training load or my examples from the sub-70 half marathon training article for some examples.

The concrete details of mileage, paces, repeats, and recovery intervals can only carry you so far—to internalize the right mindset for approaching the marathon, you need to understand the principles of training that underlie the individual workouts.

Understanding the characteristics you are trying to bring about in your body will help you transform them from vague, abstract concepts into real, tangible attributes that you can draw on in training and racing.

Recap

To run a great marathon, you need to do long, fast, marathon-specific workouts to prepare your body for the specific demands of the race.

Becoming able to do these workouts requires using the full spectrum of training speeds, not just a few “magic paces,” to build up a robust ladder of support for the speeds surrounding marathon pace.

Marathon training progresses through three different phases: the general phase, the marathon-supportive phase, and the marathon-specific phase. Each phase puts progressively more emphasis on marathon pace and the speeds immediately surrounding it: 90–110% MP in the marathon supportive phase, and 95–105% MP in the marathon-specific phase.

In all phases of training, improvement comes from challenging your body with a new stimulus, then recovering well afterwards. Greater training stresses must be paired with greater amounts of recovery, which is why, as the marathon draws closer, you will need to use greater day-to-day variability in volume and intensity, even if your mileage isn’t changing.

On race day itself, you need a carefully considered race plan that covers pacing, fueling, and your mental approach to the race—that’s the best way to take full advantage of your fitness.

The real advantage of taking a principled approach to training is that no training plan can account for everything you’ll encounter. Knowing the principles behind good training will help you make better decisions when your plan doesn’t unfold as expected.

Learn more about modern marathon training

Did you enjoy this article? If so, you’ll love the full book, Marathon Excellence for Everyone. Check out the book website to learn more, or get your copy on Amazon here.

If you live outside the United States, check out Marathon Excellence: Metric Edition, which has workouts, paces, and training plans natively in kilometers—no “16.1 km” runs.

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Footnotes

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^[1] In early drafts of this article that I circulated to a few friends, I used the phrase “biological roots”—a common reaction from many readers was that, in popular culture, the word “biology” is often used as a shorthand for “something you can’t change”—for example, a chronic disease with “biological causes.” I found this a totally understandable reaction, but it made me realize that my own connotation of “biology” is more like “the systems in your body that adapt and change in response to stimuli”—which is quite out of step with the connotation of “biology” in wider culture. Using the term “physiological roots” helps sidestep some of this instinctive connection between biology and immutability.

^[2] Remember that I have a handy and free pace percentage calculator, and a companion race pace calculator too.

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