I watched both the men’s and women’s marathon races in the Olympics last week. A non-runner has a hard time wondering how anyone could be watching a group of athletes running down the road for over two hours and watching a repetition of legs moving back and forth to be exciting. I suppose it is an interest from having run several marathons to enjoy watching the strategies and effort put in by the runners. It is watching a group of maybe 25 runners running down the road. A few miles farther the group is now 18 runners, then 12 runners, then 5 runners, and finally one lone runner kicking to the finish line. For the men running so effortlessly and then have the announcer mention that at mile 18 the lead runners ran a 5K distance in 14:28 minutes. That is well under running a five-minute mile for over 26 miles. It is hard to imagine going that fast for that far. The women runners are close to that and are somewhere in the five minutes time frame.
While marathon season is still a few months away this is about the time a runner needs to start training to run a marathon. For most runners trying to build up the endurance to run a marathon takes about 12 weeks. That puts the marathon date into the middle of November or early December which is usually the start of marathon season in Texas.
For a runner thinking of running a marathon and looking for a program to follow the result is a wide variety of offerings. From Galloway recommending running 30 mile runs so that the runner knows they can run 26.2 miles, to other programs suggest running 10K races for speed with a long-distance run of around 15 miles as a good method. The logic behind this method is if you run a 10K fast and then slow the pace down for the marathon you can run 26.2 miles. Then you will find any number of combinations between these two extremes that runners, especially those that have run several marathons that fit their style the best.
