Training for a marathon is like building a house. The first thing you do before laying a brick is make sure the footings of the house are deep enough to allow you to build up. Then you build with confidence that the house won’t fall down further down the line. Think of the house falling down as you being injured.
What Is Base Training?
In essence it is building capacity and resilience into your muscular and aerobic systems that then allows you build endurance and speed within your marathon training block.
When runners miss this key section out, it invariably leads to injury, fatigue and time out from training, which can then set them back on their goals for the race, or even end their marathon dream all together.
Why Is It Important?
Without it you are effectively asking your body to do something it is not prepared for. A runner without a solid foundation is going to get tired very quickly, each run becomes harder than the next and recovery feels impossible. Marathon training is as much about how well you can recover, as much as well can you run.
Your muscular system is then under immense strain and will lead to injury. Tendonitis is extremely common in runners who try and build to quickly and with no preparation.
Tendonitis is inflammation of the tendons, it’s really painful and most common around the knees and and ankles and can take from 2 to 6 weeks to recover from, depending on your age and the severity of the injury.
How Long Does Base Training Take?
This depends on you and what base you are starting from. On average it takes 6 weeks, but can be 4 weeks if starting from a solid base or can be 12 weeks if you are a beginner or maybe an older runner (older in running terms is 45+)
What Are The Benefits of Marathon Base Training?
- Huge reduction in risk of injury.
- Huge reduction in risk of fatigue.
- Running will feel much easier.
- Recovery from runs will be easier and quicker.
- It allows real consistency with training (crucial).
- You will absorb the training you do much better.
- It teaches you how to run easy and what that truly feels like.
- It slowly builds you a new routine, which means it’s sustainable.
- It increases your confidence that you can handle a marathon training block.
Marathon running is hard, it’s meant to be hard or everyone would do it, and whilst there has been a huge spike in recreational runners since 2021, marathon running still remains a challenge that less than 1% of people actually attempt. So be under no illusions of the size of the task ahead of you in training.
Marathon training is much harder than the race itself, because it’s weeks of consistent load you put upon yourself, and without a solid base to build from, that weekly task becomes incredibly hard to stay consistent with and to achieve decent progress.