Hi. I am new to this forum and new to running. I am taking part in the New York Marathon in November and started training 6 months ago. I have been following the Mike Gratton beginners schedule which is based on time on your feet but I am worried that I am not covering enough miles. The most time I have run without stopping so far is one hour and the longest with run/walk 2 1/2 hours but as my pace is a sorry 12 minutes per mile I am not doing many miles. I will be building up to a maximum of 3 hours. I also missed four weeks of training but have no injury worries (at present!)

Do you think it is better to run/walk and do more miles. Or will time on my feet be enough? I have been looking at the Hal Higdon training plan and wondering if I would be better to follow that on which builds up to 20 miles four weeks before the marathon.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Thanks, TraineeRunner

Hi,
You still have about 7/8 weeks to the NY marathon I believe so there's plenty of time to get the mileage into your legs...and mind!
If you are doing 12mph you'd be an elite runner so I assume you are taking 12 mins to do a mile..is that right? If so you could try the method used by The Penguin in Runners World which involves running and walking throughout the marathon distance. This method allows you to recover whilst walking and many swear by it.

Ideally you should get to do 3 20mile run/walks pre-race. At your current pace you appear to have done a max of 12.5 miles so far so getting to this ideal may not be possible. However if you increase your mileage by 10% each week you should be able to get a long one in before NY.

As part of your training you should also try to do some speed work and a mid distance run during the week.

Not done NY myself but I did do Chicago 4 years ago and have done 7 marathons in all.

All the best with your training and with the race itself.

Oops, I meant 12 minutes miles! I have done some speed training sessions doing 1 mile x 3 at fast pace with 3 minute rest inbetween and I managed just under 11 mins for each mile but I find that I am unable to keep that up when running for a long period of time.

Thank you for your help and I will continue to increase the mileage as you suggested and hope that my speed will improve by the time the marathon comes.

The main thing is to make sure you don't injure yourself so whilst increasing mileage and speed be aware of your limitations and what your body tells you.

Do you train alone? If so I would suggest you find a local running, not athletic, club to join.

Have you entered any other races? If not it might be a good idea to do so pre-NY simply to get some idea of how to organise yourself on the day. There are plenty of 1/2 M about.

In my opinion... don't worry about your marathon speed - accept that you're 12 minute miling (or slower) and concentrate on getting the weekly long run together so you have the time in your legs - so you know what it feels like, so your body can adapt a little and so that you can arrive on race day confident you know at least what half way (20 miles) feels like. You can still do the speed work during your mid-week training - but just use it to strengthen yourself - don't entertain too many crazy ideas about how your marathon will be fast... You'll have loads of company and competition at 12 minute miles - I guarantee you will not be short of people to race at any point.

If you do even start to get the idea of going faster for your first mara then find a local fishmonger and get her to slap you round the face with a haddock.

Make sure you enjoy your first marathon, get to the finish line with a (exhausted but genuine) smile, and set a PB to beat "next time"!

I must admit to becoming a bit obsessive about how slow I am running. I went to the New York Marathon information day last Sunday which was organised by Mike Gratton and part of the day was a 9-mle run in Richmond Park. They split into groups 7-8 min milers, 8-9 min milers and last of all 10 min milers & the rest. It had been stated in the iternary that there would be a run-walk group but there wasnt. Apart from not being used to running on the dirt track type of surface, the warm-up up pace which lasted 15 minutes was too fast for me! The race was also at 1:30 on a really hot sunny afternoon. I was lucky to find someone else who ran with me but I was a bit despondant afterwards. I havnt entered any races yet.
Thanks for the advice.

As a long distance coach i belive every runner needs to seek advice from a experienced coach to assess what is right for them, Mileage is important when running a marathon but not to many its more important to run comfortably over a longer distance than to flog yourself to death. you need to remember you need one session a week of faster type interval running so that you know both physicaly & mentaly that you can run faster than you will need to in the marathon. i know when i ran my best marathon i took advice from a top coach who dropped my weekly mileage by a third. I was still doing long runs but there was more quality faster runs included in my sceduel. Many runners in the 1980s became obsesed by distane and with the exeption of a few none lasted very long. go and ask advice from a good coach

__________________
Organic Exercise & sports injury massage gel

RP's lovely :-) But undulating! How long did your lap take you? We generally do it in anywhere between 1 hour and 1 hour 20... If you're interested in some more training runs there, then some of us run it on Sunday quite often (not this week though as it's closed for the duathlon!) although we generally don't do much walking now (we keep plodding if we can). Also if you are in the SW corner of London then the Cabbage Patch 10 miler, the Kingston 8.2 miler (and 16 too) and the weekly free BPTT 5km race are all good autumn outings.

Don't get despondant.....there will many on the day who haven't trained properly but will run off as if it's a 100m sprint and who will suffer as a consequence. Tortoise and Hare applies to marathons.

I think it took about 1 1/2 hours to go once around the Park and we were lucky to escape not being run over by the enormous amount of cyclists (I still have bell ringing in my ears!). Although I agree that the park itself is lovely and would be a great place to run but I live in south east London and it is too far to go regularly. Thank you for the offer though. I am thinking about doing the Kingston 16 miler on 1st October. Do you think there will be other plodders there?