Don't Run A Marathon

There’s no reason to rush into the marathon distance, especially if you really want to run one.

All of these people ran for years before moving up to the marathon distance and some of them ran at the Olympics! Atlanta, 2020.

I woke up at 5 AM on Saturday morning to go get my long run done with my running club. The men’s Olympic marathon had finished a mere two hours before that, and while I did consider going to sleep at 6 PM so I’d be well-rested for the start of the race, I ultimately decided to attempt to go spend two hours with a bunch of runners and hope that I could avoid race spoilers.

When I came home after the run, I showered as quickly as possible so I could hustle to the couch and watch the race before anyone could accidentally spoil the results for me before I watched it for myself. All that to say: I really like the marathon. It’s an incredibly challenging distance. There’s a reason that all of the best-known races are marathons.

I think a lot of people see the Olympic marathon and get inspired to try and run one themselves. I’m not one to complain about people starting to run, but I would like to suggest pumping the brakes on jumping straight into a marathon. I promise it’ll make the whole experience better if you do.

Look at how much fun I’m having in a 5k.

So many people think of the marathon as the pinnacle of running achievement. It’s a grueling distance to race, and the training is harder than that. The challenge is part of the allure, but so is the ceremony around that distance.

If you know anything about running races¹, you probably know about the Boston Marathon. It’s a big production, and it’s a big deal for the runners who get to take part in it every year. A much bigger deal than the fundraiser 5k your kid’s school puts on every year. That means it’s a bigger achievement than running a 5k as well, right?

It’s a longer distance, but I don’t think it’s a better distance. There’s just as much pride to be had at mastering other distances too. And practicing shorter distances first will help anyone prepare better for when they finally get to the marathon.

Training for shorter distances will benefit your marathon experience

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: Marathon training sucks no matter what, but it’s worse if you don’t have a mileage base built up. Trying to jump to the marathon distance without giving your body time to adapt to the rigors of training for that distance leaves you at high risk for injury by running too much too soon, or risks leaving you underprepared for the race by running too little in training.

Getting used to running higher mileage by training for shorter distances, especially the half, will help prepare your body for the demands of training for a marathon while getting you fit to run one faster.

One of the things that many runners of all levels of experience do in marathon training is focus too much on the one long run per week. It’s not just the long run mileage that matters in marathon prep. It’s the total weekly mileage that matters most. If you’re running one long run per week and very little on top of that, you’re probably not going to have a good time on race day because you don’t have sufficient aerobic fitness. You’re going to be exhausted long before you hit the end of the race because your body isn’t ready for 26.2 miles of heavy exertion.

But building up aerobic fitness takes time. You can’t just jump into a training plan that starts you off at 30 miles per week. You have to start lower than that and build up to it. Instead of just grinding along building up mileage with a marathon as an end goal, you can make bigger gains by training for shorter races and improving your speed at those distances in the meantime.

I hit 50 miles per week at my peak for this half marathon and did 14 mile long runs twice. Shorter races don’t mean you have to run less in training!

You can run massive weekly mileage training for a half. Just because the race is only 13.1 miles doesn’t mean that you can’t run a ton of volume to prepare for it. And the half marathon is an excellent fitness-builder for the full marathon because they’re both purely aerobic distances. The workouts might differ slightly, but gains you get from half training will apply to the marathon as well.

More straightforwardly: The marathon isn’t the only distance that matters. I’ve run Boston but still haven’t broken 20 in the 5k. There are massive achievements to work toward in every distance, and focusing on those before tacking the marathon doesn’t make you less of a runner.

Marathon-first training carries a huge risk of injury

Hitting your first 20 mile run in marathon training is a huge milestone for any debutant at the distance. It took me about three hours to finish mine, and that was an exciting prospect. Three hours for a 20 miler lined up pretty well for a four hour marathon finish time, and that was my goal.

I’d been running for five years at that point and was much faster than I was when I started running. If three hours of running seems like a long time to run at once, imagine what training for a marathon from scratch might look like. If you’re running ten minute miles in training, a 20 mile run will take three hours and twenty minutes. I started out running 11-12 minute miles, so a 20 mile run would take 3:40-4:00.

The body doesn’t know miles, it knows stress and strain. 20 miles in three hours for someone running 45 miles per week requires less recovery time than 20 miles in 3:40 for someone running 30 miles per week. The first person can probably take a day off and then do an easy run and be ready for their next hard session. The second person just ran ⅔ of their weekly mileage in one run and took 18% longer to do it than the first person. They’re probably going to need more days off or more easy days, or they’re going to stress their body too much and succumb to some kind of overuse injury before they even get to the starting line.

Shorter, smaller races are also easier to get trophies at!

It’s not like anyone can just will themselves to be faster; we all have to work with the natural talent we have at first. So how do you improve your speed so that you’re able to take three hours for a 20 mile run instead of 3:40? By training for distances that don’t require that much time on your feet to be well-prepared to race. And training builds up bones, joints, and muscles. A few years of training for shorter distances before taking a crack at the marathon can help make you more injury-resistant and better prepared for the stress when you start stretching the long run out.

You might have thought that three hours of running at once sounds unbearable. Even for people who love training for marathons, the longest of the long runs can still be an exhausting experience. Physical injury isn’t the only risk you run with weeks after weeks of three or more hours on your feet. It’s really easy to burn yourself out during training and lose the desire to finish out the plan and get to race day. Checking an item off a bucket list isn’t worth months of dreading every single run on your schedule.

You’ll probably have a better time on race day if you take your time getting there

You can’t see it here but there is a Patagonia fleece wrapped around my waist in this picture. It was a bad idea.

My first half marathon was kind of a huge mess. It was chilly that morning, so I wore tights and a long sleeve shirt and a fleece pullover. I know now that all of that was far too much clothing. I was cold at the start, but I was going to heat up significantly as the sun came up and I started exerting myself. I didn’t know it that morning.

If you wait for the marathon until you have more experience running, you’ll be better prepared just by virtue of having more experience racing. You’ll know how to go out hard without going out too hard and blowing up². You’ll know how to pace yourself and find out how to nail down the race pace that clocks in right at “barely sustainable but not impossible”. It’s a lot more comfortable to experiment and figure out where that line is in a 5k or at the end of a half marathon than it is to go out way too fast in a marathon and realize you’ve gotten out over your skis with another 16 miles left in the race.

In the same vein, experimenting with fueling in half marathon training and racing eliminates a lot of guesswork and bad experiences on training runs in marathon training. These days, we know that taking in calories during a marathon leads to better finishing times, more energy to tackle the final miles, and less damage to the body in the process. All that to say that making sure you find fuel that works with your stomach and palate is an important part of the marathon training process.

But if you start fueling during half marathon training, you’ll have a better feel for what works for you in training and even on race day. That means fewer experiments gone wrong during valuable long runs during the marathon training cycle and a better understanding of you body’s needs come race day.

It took me so many years to get a 5k picture where I actually looked like I was running fast and then this is the face I make

And lastly, I think it’s important to address the elephant in the room: if you’ve got more lifetime miles in your legs and experience training and racing before you start training for a marathon, you’re probably going to run faster. You may think that you don’t care about your finishing time because just finishing at all is a worthy goal in itself. I agree with the latter statement; putting in the training, making it to the start line healthy, and making it to the finish line in one piece is a massive triumph. But I also know that race distances never get easier, you just go faster. So given that I’m always going to be in for quite a bit of suffering, I’d rather suffer for less time than for more.

Getting those lifetime miles up before the marathon doesn’t just help with a shorter race day, either. It helps make the daily training grind more manageable. You’re able to cover your training run distances more quickly, or you’re able to run more miles in the same amount of time, which usually helps you get faster, and the cycle feeds itself.

Comparing nine minute miles and ten minute miles, you’re either able to run 45 miles per week in almost an hour less time per week, or you can run five miles more per week in the same amount of time. Over the course of a full training cycle, that’s a lot of extra time or miles!

I waited almost five years to start training for my first marathon and I wouldn’t have wanted to do it any other way.

By waiting, I was more prepared for the rigors of marathon training and of the race itself. I got to learn the ins and outs of effective training for my body and understand how I respond to different types of fuel, different race strategies, and how to keep going when the going gets really tough. I knew how to set realistic goals for myself and had built up the fitness to achieve them both within the training cycle and in the preceding years.

I haven’t run a marathon since 2023. It’s a uniquely rewarding distance, but it takes everything I have to do it right, and even with the best training cycle in the world, things can still go wrong on race day. A marathoner sinks months of training into one single day, and most of us take weeks to recover afterward, so we only get one shot per training cycle.

The marathon is different from all of the other common road race distances. It’s the only one that requires you push past your body’s physical limitations³ just to finish. But it’s not the only one that matters, and I think anyone who works on a mastery (or at least a passing familiarity) of shorter distances first is going to have a better experience and a better appreciation of that experience than someone who foregoes that preparation.

The marathon can bestow upon you glory, but it can also make you suffer in 30º temperatures and rain for hours on end. Boston, 2018.

1. And you live in the United States. I don’t know for sure how big Boston is outside of the US relative to all the other races out there. It’s not nothing, but I don’t want to presume the rest of the world cares about Boston as much as we do.

2. Blowing up or hitting the wall or carrying the piano in running parlance is when you expended too much energy too soon in the race and can’t sustain that pace anymore. You’re forced to slow down because you cannot will your body to go any faster. It’s a horrible feeling. If you want to see it in action, go watch a middle school or high school 800m race. Around 500 meters, you’ll see someone who ran flat out for 400 meters and left nothing in the tank for the back half of the race.

3. This goes back to the fueling. Our bodies don’t contain enough readily available glycogen to get us a full 26 miles, which is why we suck down globs of sugar paste periodically during the race. We’ve got enough for about 20 miles, which means that we don’t strictly need to fuel for shorter distances, but the marathon is another beast.