Hi! My name is Richard Francis. This is a video on how to run a marathon. We just covered form and technique. This next clip will cover building mileage properly into your program.
Building endurance. How do you work up the 26.2 miles? It's quite a distance if you've never even run a mile before. Well, hopefully I'll provide you a little bit of advice and how to work up to that amount of mileage.
The best way to start is first of all, like I said hopefully you have a friend or group you are training with that'll help you get there. But the best way, really is to start off if you are just starting with a mile, and you have a problem running, make sure you alternate running and walking. So if you can walk, if you can run for about 5 minutes, alternate it with 5 minutes of running, 2 minutes of walking. If you can only jog for a minute, go ahead and jog for a minute, rest for 30 seconds. Jog for a minute, or rest for a minute, and then go back to running. So, alternate until you are able to build up 10 minutes of running to five minutes of walking continuously alternating.
Now one thing you want to remember, is never to run through pain. So if you have a pain in your knee or anything like that, don't run through it. The most common injury that beginners run into with running are overused injuries, which is putting in too much mileage too quickly. It happens a lot, it happens all of the time. You get excited; you just signed up for your first marathon, you got to get out there, you got to train, you know, you've got a 20 week program that you are going to be working with, so you've got plenty of time to build up your distance.
Another thing to remember is, you don't necessarily have to run the full 26 miles before you actually run the event. A lot of people think, gosh, I got to run the 26 miles if I'm going to make it to the finish line of the event before hand. Well, no, you don't. It's good for our mental stimulus to make sure, gosh, I finished 26 miles, that means I can do it during the event. Well, if you run up until about 20 miles in your program, 21 miles, that's plenty to get you to that 26 miles for the event.
The enthusiasm, the energy of the race at the event will get you pass the 21 miles, that last 5 miles. The crowds alone will get you passed that 21 miles that you trained before hand. So you can rely on the energy and the adrenaline you have to really get you through those last 5 miles. That's what we found a lot in our training programs is, you don't have to train the full amount.
So another thing, make sure you get enough rest. Rest will also help you prevent injury. So when you are training for a marathon, you're going to -- a lot of things I say revolve around one common denominator, and that's avoidance, prevention of injury. The thing that prevents people from getting to the finish line of a marathon is injury. So rest, make sure you get enough rest that'll prevent injury. Make sure you don't do too many miles too soon, that will help prevent injuries well.
So when you are building up your miles for an endurance program, you're going to make sure you have weeks of rest in there. So you have a week where you're building up 10, 15, maybe 16 miles in the weekend. Well, the week after you put in the long run, some of those weeks you actually cut down the miles and do less miles, to give yourself a little bit of rest. You actually think of it as training in steps. So you take a little step, you'll level out for a little bit. Then you take your next step, level it out. So you never really want to increase your mileage by much more than 10% a week. But make sure you have enough rest in there.
Okay, in the next clip we're going to cover speed work. So, how to increase your pace?
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