Sub 3 Hour Marathon Training Guide

Mileage

As an elite athlete you will need to run a lot of miles in order to achieve your best marathon times. The truly elite sometimes run up to 150 miles in a week, although rarely, and this is only advised if you are world class and can still maintain a quality of training whilst doing this (very few can)

Putting a specific figure on how many miles you should run is very tough, as it is a totally individual thing. The rules about building up your mileage apply and at this level you will probably be looking to plan peaks of mileage within your mesocycles (generally about 4 - 6 weeks) as well as a gradual build up to peak a few weeks prior to your race.

As you are now an experienced marathon runner, clearly it wouldn't be ideal to continue building at 10% a week as you would soon be asking yourself to run 1000s of miles a week! I good guide is to only increase your total mileage by about 15-20% as a maximum year on year.

Also if you feel the quality of your running is dropping at all, because you are tired when you start sessions, then don't try to fix it by running more miles, but by easing back and getting the quality back into your running.

In terms of doing repetitions, we suggest that mile reps at 10 to 15 seconds inside the pace of your marathon are a good place to start. You can try playing with these, doing a variety of numbers and recoveries to find what works for you. It is a very individual thing, but something in the region of 6-8 with about 90secs between reps is a good place to progress to.