Marathon Prep 2023

For those that know me, know I’m passionate about training, especially Olympic weightlifting, CrossFit and getting stronger. Around September of 2022 I realised my training was getting a bit stagnant and progress was slowing right down so I decided I wanted to try something new alongside weightlifting. This was wrestling at the Griphouse with Cammy Nicol. I’d been loving this; however, I had picked up several upper body niggles, not serious injuries but some irritation as my body is demanded to be in positions it has never been in before.

This led to December of 2022 in which I was still balancing weightlifting and wrestling but decided to take a break from my Olympic lifting and do something different that I wasn’t totally comfortable with. This resulted in signing up for a marathon which really felt completely out of my comfort zone. I don’t think those close to me could believe I was even thinking of it, but on the 19th of December I dropped the hammer and decided the Manchester Marathon in April would be my purgatory. This would give me just over 16 weeks’ worth of training. 

When I sent Jonny, one of the owners of Physio Effect who is a regular runner and running coach himself my entry email, he knew I was serious about completing this so took it upon himself to plan my programming for the next 4 months. This began with a 10k time trial on Christmas Day, cruelty at its finest and no doubt some sort of sick challenge from Jonny for me to prove my commitment!

THE AEROBIC BUILDING

As mentioned previously, my training began on Christmas Day with a 10km time trial in which Jonny could base my paces/heart rate zones for the upcoming training block on. The first few weeks consisted of between 20 and 40k per week to build some running volume into my legs and to build an aerobic base so I don’t “die on my arse in the second half” in the wise words of Jonny.

One thing I love is structured programming and often I can stick to a rigid program if it has been written for me. With the Jonny’s guidance, the plan was to build up an aerobic base over the first couple of months and complete the marathon with a time of between 3:30 and 4:00. Simultaneously I would still be attending the wrestling classes and building strength in the gym with a shift in focus onto unilateral strength (lunges, Bulgarian split squats), deadlifts and overhead press. This may seem like a lot of training, but I love running early in the morning around 6/7am before my day starts so this frees up the majority of the afternoon to work or if I have extra time, potentially do some double training days. Since running was the focus, this would be prioritised and over the coming months I would slowly decrease my volume in the gym. Around one month out from the marathon I would completely take out wrestling training to reduce the likelihood of an inconvenient injury occurring. During this time, I was also due to be on placement for university whilst still working so my biggest concern was potentially not having enough time in the day to fit in my training. Where there’s a will there’s a way though and this is likely why I really thrived training very early in the mornings.

Training Diary

25/01/23 - We are now 4 weeks into training with my longest distance so far being 15km, one thing I’ve noticed is people saying “I couldn’t do a marathon, I hate running” and I now believe I know why this is the case with many people. I think a lot of people run their easy runs too hard, go balls to the wall, jack their heart rate through the roof and die. Now that I am doing my runs based off heart rate and rate of perceived exertion (RPE) thanks to Jonny, I know that it’s okay to run slower as theoretically, you need to run slow to run fast. It’s all about those Mitochondria.

01/02/2023 - Longest run completed last week. It was meant to be a trail run of 18km but standard Lewis effort, I went the wrong way at Chatelhault and had to double back on myself. I checked my watch to clarify it was another 3km back to the car so thought to myself “screw it, let’s just make it a half”. I was delighted I done this which felt like a good achievement.

04/03/23 – 33.8km trail run on the West Highland Way. Jonny sent me a route to follow on my watch via a gpx file, little did I know there were PLENTY of hills throughout this. Sun was splitting the skies which made this run much more enjoyable! At the 20km mark however was a big stinking hill that I can only describe as never ending! I felt I was on this incline for at least 30 minutes (potentially maybe over exaggerating here). I must have cursed Jonny’s name about 6 times as I slog myself up the hill.

Now that we are just over a month out from the race, I have reduced my gym sessions to 2 a week and I have completely taken out wrestling to focus solely on running and maintaining current strength.

18/03/23 – Longest run to date, 37.1k/22 miles. I managed it in just over 3 hours 30 minutes, which equates to 3 podcasts episodes. The Erskine bridge was the turn around point which made things a lot worse as I realised “I AM MILES away from my flat”! I thoroughly enjoyed this run though and I was able to stick with a consistent pace throughout and maintain my Zone 2 Heart Rate/RPE.

03/04/23 – Time to Taper. All the hard work has been done and now I am able to decrease mileage, keep intensity high and fuel properly. Lucky for me, I decided to book a 3 day holiday to Marseille so managed to soak up my final easy miles in a different country.

13/03/23 – The Carb load 😊. 3 days out from the race the goal was to increase carbohydrate intake to around 500-600g each day prior to the race to ensure my glycogen stores are topped up as this is the body’s preferred source of energy thus, I will be properly fuelled going into Sunday.

Race day – Manchester marathon – April 16th 2023

5:30 – Wake up. I always tend to sleep well in hotels which was a massive bonus leading into this race. 

6:30am – Breakfast – 3 slices of sourdough toast, banana and biscoff spread. This has been my go-to fuel for all my long runs, so I looked forward to consuming this.

7am – Coffee. Small hit of caffeine prior to my 30-minute drive into Manchester City Centre.

8/9am – Prepare my kit for the race.

9:50am Race starts.

Finishing time – 3 hours, 33 minutes, and 11 seconds

Race in review

I am absolutely delighted with how I performed. Started off the first mile at a nice conversational pace until the crowd dispersed so that I could find my flow. Luckily, I made a friend very early on that ran at the same pace as me and we stuck together for the first 13 miles.

Throughout the race I managed to stay on top of my nutrition taking a gel roughly every 20 minutes. So, this equated to about 60g carbohydrates per hour. Alongside this I was taking a few sips of water at every station which prevented me from hitting the dreaded ‘wall’ or ‘bonking’ so to speak. 

From mile 2 right the way up to mile 20 I was averaging an 8-minute mile. From miles 20 onwards I upped the pace slightly which turned out to be about a 7:45 minute mile that I managed to maintain. I didn’t want to become obsessed with my watch and pacing so this was based on feel (RPE) and looking at the splits afterwards. At this time, I also looked down at my shoes and noticed my toe had bled right through my shoes, “oh dear” was my initial reaction followed by multiple swear words going through my head.

Mile 26 I could see the finish line, I checked my watch, and it was roughly 3 hours 31 minutes. I was absolutely delighted knowing I was finishing this in just over 3 and a half hours when my goal was anything under 4 hours.

Can’t thank Jonny enough for the coaching, check ins and treatment to ensure my body was in good condition and adapting to the training stimulus well.

Onto the next one…

A short word from Jonny on the plan

objectives

When Lewis initially said to me in the clinic he’d be looking to do the Manchester Marathon in April it seemed a great opportunity to put my recent running coaching qualifications into practice on someone other than myself and my wife Mariam. I maybe inflicted myself upon poor Lewis as I was really keen to help him train effectively and safely for his first ever running event! Having watched Lewis train over the last few years with his weightlifting, crossfit and more recently wrestling, I knew there’d be no problem getting him to follow a plan; we just needed the right plan for his goals:

1. Finish the Manchester Marathon with no running background in 16 weeks

2. Finish Manchester under 4 hours

3. Have it not take over his life and all of his training as he does enjoy the gym and his new hobby of wrestling. 

We had from late December until April 16th to get him in condition, so no time to waste. The biggest threat to this plan was really Lewis’s lack of running experience where he wouldn’t have the aerobic conditioning or musculoskeletal conditioning to do well with a running plan that was trying to force his mileage and pace too quickly. To be fair to Lewis he is very well clued up on sports science being a qualified sports therapist who massages athletes for us at Physio Effect and a student paramedic. He really took on board my initial conversations with him regarding this entire marathon block being anchored by aerobic base building and just accumulating gradually increasing volume while staying injury free. 

Lewis’ training Plan

We planned out a 16 week Lydiard Pyramid plan that had 8 weeks aerobic base training, 3 week hill training, 2 weeks anaerobic, 2 weeks integration phase and 1 week of taper. This allowed us to work on all the different running and race development he would need rather than just having him repeat pretty much the same plan weekly with an increasing mileage. During this time Lewis spent the majority of his training in his low aerobic zones with a variety of speed workouts accounting for approximately 20% of his weekly training time. Gradually we saw his running economy improve as well as his tolerance to ever increasing volumes from week to week. 

He executed the plan perfectly and had his brother programming him some strength work alongside it twice weekly. About 6-7 weeks out from race day Lewis was also practising full race nutrition on all of his long runs to take in 60g carbs per hour and 500ml fluids and electrolyte. By the end of this we were talking each other into all sorts of weird and wonderful flavours of gels that we’d imagined were our secret weapons on race day. 

If I’m honest I felt 16 weeks was fine for Lewis to train for Manchester as he’s had a consistent number of years of training under his belt with other sports, he wasn’t overweight and generally was very health and fitness conscious. Lewis also had a realistic goal of completing the marathon and ideally sub-4 hours. He proved me right and was completely consistent with his training throughout and had the sense to ask about modifying sessions or moving them to just see off the inevitable niggle he could feel. I know from my Sports Physio work with runners that injury risk is so high in new runners due to the lack of Musculotendinous conditioning, poor aerobic base, poor running efficiency and a tendency to run too hard and long for their current fitness. Once conditioned and running regularly the increasing volume can become protective of injury. We just had to navigate this first 8 weeks for Lewis and avoid acute overload, sickening him of the running or causing him undue stress with injury. I was so impressed how well he followed the plan and resisted the urge to push harder which he’d be used to with crossfit. From the start of his plan to 2.5 weeks before Manchester he took his 10km time trial down from 51 minutes to 43 minutes so we could see his aerobic base had developed massively in those 13 weeks and I was confident his 4 hour goal for Manchester would be bettered by some margin. 

My Review of Lewis’ Race

On race day, what can I say except he took everything he practised in his training and executed it, in my opinion, to achieve as good a first marathon effort as you’ll ever see! He started at an easy and controlled pace for the first few miles, increased to hold his target pace for most of the race and kicked for the last 5 miles down a further 30 sec/mile and ended up running a decent negative split and a fantastic time of 3 hours and 33 minutes. All of this while reporting he actually enjoyed it and was “buzzing” to do another. Turns out running slower to get faster, eating and drinking well and watching your early pace on race day does work! This just takes incredible discipline and for that I just have to applaud and congratulate Lewis! It’s incredibly satisfying to see such a positive experience for him with this and I’ve been delighted to be part of this with him. It’s really pleasing that he’s decided to continue running and has enjoyed getting out on the local trails with me for a social run. We’re now looking at a few more weeks off for him from a plan where he can keep some maintenance mileage up to give us a good start point for the Dunoon Ultra in October where he can expect this early season marathon training to provide the perfect start point for his first trail ultra.