So, a little while ago I decided it was time to attempt another marathon. As you'll know if you've read my previous post My first marathon, I ran the Nottingham marathon almost exactly two years ago and in hindsight, I made a lot of rookie errors. This time, with the experience of one under my running belt, I want to try to do my preparation a little differently, to see if I can manage a more all-round successful race.

For my first time, I followed a training plan, a sensible decision I thought, except I have a tendency to get a little obsessive and found myself following it a bit too strictly at times, scared to deviate from it even if I was exhausted or had an injury coming on. I was already a fairly experienced distance runner but during my marathon training, my weekly mileage shot up to an average of 50 miles a week with my longest week at just shy of 70 miles. This was a big difference from my usual 30 miles and looking back at my plan now, I wonder how I didn't completely fall apart. I ended up with plantar fascitiis among other injuries but instead of resting, I largely ignored them and kept going. Additionally, not a lot of my training was comprised of easy/steady running, I did hard workouts back-to-back such as 10km tempo on a Friday night followed by a Parkrun the next morning. I can see now that this approach gave me very little time to recover and was actually detrimental to my training. I was also a bit over-enthusiastic on my long runs. Most sources I have found suggest going up to 20 miles, however I decided on 22 miles and I had a tendency to push too hard on what should have been easy runs. This just meant that by the time I got to the actual marathon, I was exhausted, had lingering injuries and found it a lot harder than my training performances would have suggested, struggling by about 15 miles.

This time however, I haven't followed a written training plan. Obviously I still respect the difficulty of a marathon and have made sure to gradually increase my weekly mileage, just not to quite the same extent. I'm at just over 50km a week so far, rather than 50 miles! While I haven't had planned sessions, I've kept track of everything I've done and made sure to include a weekly long run up to 20 miles, some tempo sessions, a bit of fartlek and recovery runs, plus rest days(!). I've never been very good at rest days and would often do a session the day after a long run, but this time, if I feel too tired, I'll have a rest day or two instead of pushing through it. So far, this approach seems to have worked; I haven't any injuries and no plantar fasciitis. I'm taking this as an encouraging sign that I might have found a better way of training, for me at least, although only the marathon event itself will tell me if I'm correct.

With any luck, I may have learnt from some of my rookie first-time errors and hopefully this will lead to a more successful marathon attempt this time around. I'll try to be more strict with my taper, not to eat too late the night before and, crucially, not to set off too fast! However, part of this experiment involves not placing too much expectation on the actual event - 'casual' marathon training as I have been calling it - so I'll just have to see what happens on the day!