What Goes Into A Marathon Plan In 2020?

Back in 2018 I wrote, ‘WHAT GOES INTO A MARATHON TRAINING PLAN’ for Bakline running, I may need to amend that article a bit for our current conditions in 2020. Can we effectively plan for a marathon that we don’t know will happen?

No… but also yes.

You may not be able to envision the finish line but you can at least prepare yourself for the starting line. The beauty of marathon training is that majority of your training plan will simply look like glorified base training. 3 weeks up, 1 week down, rinse, repeat… eventually you’ll know when you’re race date is and you can start to mix in more specific training. There is something to be said for being fit year round, as well as empirical evidence behind hitting every energy system throughout the entire training cycle… Gone are the days of simple periodization, in are the days of year round fitness.

So, what would that look like?

My college coach still holds a grudge against one of my teammates for asking, “Do you like… make up these workouts on the spot?” My teammate thought she was complimenting our coach in good fun, but the idea that he was just throwing workouts out there with no deeper thought was disconcerting, to say the least. It’s a lesson that I took to heart, and still hold to this day: just because you “know your stuff” doesn’t mean that you…