Running Clique

[Ted Maul]

Just done 33km run through the city. Marathon potentially in 7 weeks, still waiting for the confirmation. Felt good to do that distance and mentally to have less than 10 to do makes it seem doable now.

Gonna ease off a bit in the coming weeks. Any advice from you lot who've done them before?

The thing I learnt the hard way with the marathon is that is essentially a 10k with a 20 mile warm up. Unless you're aiming for time, I wouldn't worry about covering 20 miles+ in training. It will take too long, your body will take too long to recover and the benefits of doing the longer run are completely negated as you can't run again for the best part of a week. If you're seven weeks out now I'd focus over the next three weekends of hitting some 2h00 to 2h30 long runs - maybe adding some segments of marathon pace effort, but nothing more. Recover well in the weeks and building into your first marathon (I'm assuming it's your first), I'd start to taper from about two weeks out. Don't drop the frequency of your runs, drop the intensity distance i.e if you normally run 4 x 6 miles a week with a 15 mile long run, do 4 x 3 miles with a 10 mile long run for your taper. Final bit of advice would be not to over do the 'carb loading' eat normally, the last thing you want is three hours of crippling stomach cramps. Enjoy it and good luck.

Boring question that may have been asked, or alluded to, in a previous post - apologies if it has.

I want to increase stamina when playing football. Is it better to run a shorter distance without stopping and ploughing on through, or would it be more beneficial to run longer distances with a minute or two break, say every mile or so, to recover and have a breather?

In terms of aerobic fitness you'd need to build longer, slower runs. To develop more football specific fitness, you'll be looking at introducing efforts of say 1min hard/1min easy in the middle of your runs. Combine both and you'll find yourself getting much fitter. Perhaps get in the gym a couple of times a week for some strength work to make sure your body can cope with the stopping, starting an accelerating you get when playing football.