Optimal Life Fitness, for health, fitness and a new lifestyle outdoors.

It's that time of year again the London Marathon is only a matter of months away. Alot of you will have clients who have entered and you may have even entered yourself.

I have my own theories and ideas of how you should go about training for the marathon, but as yet they haven't fully been trialed or tested. However they have been partially tested by some of my clients with good results and they basically follow this framework:

1. 1 hill or interval session each week
2. 1 Fartlek (various speed session) each week
3. 1 longer run varying distances each week
4. 2-3 resistance training sessions each week (obviously including Olympic Lifting and Kettlebells!)

Most individuals when training for the marathon spend too much time weakly plodding around with poor posture and compounding poor running technique. This leads to pain, injury and a poor marathon running time. By sticking to one longer run each week and keeping the other sessions shorter and more intense: technique, strength, speed and fitness will improve whilst allowing the body more time to recover.

Anyway the meat of this entry and what you can take away from it is the following couple of ideas for some of your fartlek or interval sessions.

These sessions are known as 'Marathon Appreciation Sessions'. I got this idea off a client and friend. Basically they are farltek or interval sessions where you spend your work time running at or as close to the speed run by Haile Gebreselassie in World Record Marathon time.

On the 28th of September 2008 Haile Gebreselassie at the Berlin Marathon broke his own world record and recorded a time of 2hrs3mins and 59seconds. This is where the concept of the marathon appreciation session comes in. The idea is that you perform your intervals or work periods at the same speed as Haile! Now for a very small percentage of you this might be easy. For the most of us however this will prove extremely difficult.

Doing the maths: The World Record Time is 2;03:59, that is near enough to 124minutes. Now to convert the distance to an athletic track, 42.5km (42500m) divided by 400ms, this leaves us with a total of 106.25 (106 and a quarter laps) consecutive laps.

Basically Haile runs 106.25 consecutive 400ms at 70seconds per 400m!

In the 'Marathon Appreciation Sesssions' the aim is to run at this speed (70seconds per 400m) or as close to it as you can.

A start may be to (after an appropriate warm up) try multiple 400m sprints with 2 mins rest and see how close you can get to 70seconds. You may try 5*400ms with 2mins rest.

The next step is to put this into a continuous or Fartlek session. This is where you perform 1*400m at or close to 70seconds and 1*400m at a recovery pace (as slow/fast as you are comfortable) and repeat this as many times as you can. I'm doing 6 of these with my work sets ranging from between 1:12 and 1:19 (72, 79) - I haven't been timing my recovery sets but they are slow! I'm not a runner at all but I'm really enjoying these sessions- they are tough but enjoyable if you know what I mean ie, bring a bucket! Including a warm up and recovery lap I'm done in 30minutes.

There are other ways that you can appreciate Haile's achievements. You can try and hold his speed for 100m, 200m, 600ms or 1000ms. His marathon time works out to a 1000m run in 2mins and 54 seconds, I'm not sure if I could manage one 1km at this speed!

Let me know what you think and what results you and your clients have with this session if you give it a try. If you have any other ideas for sessions please share.

All the best

BJ

Labels: fartlek, intervals, marathon, run training