The Well (hard) Runner Page

First of all .. huge congratulations to Jack Pitcher for achieving the incredible time of 2:56 at the Manchester marathon on Sunday 7th April.  This month on the Well Runner page we are featuring Jack's marathon training report detailing  how to improve your race training technique with a training  schedule and nutrition tips. 

How to run a sub 3 Marathon!! by Jack Pitcher

First of all, I’d like to say that I strongly believe just finishing a marathon or any distance of race people do is always a great achievement. Runners are all motivated in different ways and in my opinion, it’s having that motivation to get out and run that is most important whatever it is. My personal motivation is running faster and beating my own times, which leads me on to this…..

22 miles into the Bilbao night marathon, the cramps hit me, and I had to walk, a marathon I had done a fair bit of training for and had given myself an outside target of 3 hours or as close to as possible. Whilst walking the last few miles feeling sorry for myself I decided I was going to do this again and do it properly! So, after a quieter month in November I signed up for Manchester marathon and the training began.

I decided to start with a bit of guidance, so purchased the book “Advance Marathoning”. This is a seriously detailed book, too detailed and specific for me to follow down to a tee (its recommended 18-week plan includes 7 weeks with over 100 miles in!!)

What reading it did do for me though, was enable me to understand all of the different types of run and what they do for your fitness/speed/endurance. I then was able to build weeks of running that felt right for me, I didn’t ever give myself a strict plan or get too upset if a run didn’t go exactly as I wanted, I just knew that I needed to get as many miles as I could in, and include all of these different types of run. Without going into too much detail, it outlines the importance of doing speed work (eg Thursday night sessions), recovery runs, long steady runs (obviously!!) and a run that was new to me, lactate threshold runs. I do believe including at least one lactate threshold targeting run a week in my training was one of the key reasons behind me improving my marathon time so much so would highly recommend anyone looking at improving speed over long distances (HM or longer) to look into this or ask me about it.

It also enabled me to understand the nutrition needed and add a few extras to my diet to help feel more energised to do all this running! A great tip I picked up was that runners can suffer from low Iron (causing fatigue) for a number of reasons, and getting that extra iron in can be tough, but having a small glass of orange juice with a meal after a tough run will help you absorb 3 times as much iron due to the absorbic acid in the juice.

So, onto the running, I started building the miles, working hard on Thursdays and added some longer weekend runs to my schedule. Before I knew it we were in the new year and we were off to Florida for RunDisney which made a brilliant and extremely fun part of the training, adding in a load of great base miles whilst having loads of fun and a proposal to take my mind off of all the miles! 

After getting in a good base of miles I tried to keep myself as close to 50 a week as I could. I added in the Lactate threshold runs and found them getting easier and faster and felt confident I was moving in the right direction. I used tactics like running a loop pre run club to break up the midweek miles, or running to a parkrun, doing the parkrun and running home on a weekend. These tactics really helped in making a 15-mile run on tired legs fly by. Having my gorgeous fiancée Emily to train with was also an incredible boost. It really helped for both of us to be training together and she was always very supportive, we kept each other going really well.

Then, before I knew it, it was weeks instead of months until the marathon, people would ask me “How are you feeling about Manchester?” and I didn’t really know, I felt as good and as fit as I had ever been but wasn’t sure if it would be enough for my 3-hour target. So, I booked into a couple of half marathons and a 20-mile race to get a feel of where I was. If I could run 20 miles on target pace without being tapered, then surely on race day I’d be ok was my thinking. Needless to say, these all went well, I managed the 20 miles at the exact pace I ran on the day in Manchester, so I’d recommend doing this if you could before running a marathon if you are unsure on the pace you could go. Mine was 3 weeks before the big day and gave me a HUGE much needed confidence boost.

The final piece of the puzzle was the taper, I got guidance on this from the book as well, the key tip I got form it was to maintain the intensity, but just lower the volume. So, I kept up the Thursday night session, ran a fast 5k, did some marathon paced intervals but cut the total distance in half. On the actual race week, I did slow things down, more to lower injury risk than anything. I ran a parkrun the day before and turned up on race day feeling great.

2 hours, 56 minutes and 8 seconds later I was done. And I even shed a little tear after crossing the line. It was amazing to celebrate with Emily who had also just smashed out a PB (3:35:08), and the Burge’s who had come up to support us both and been the best company for the whole weekend!