Building Up to a MarathonBy Timothy Higgins

Introduction

Timothy P. Higgins contributes to a number of nonprofit organizations and charitable initiatives including The Wounded Warrior Project, St. Judes Children’s Research Hospital, Team for Kids, and The Coalition for the Homeless. In addition to supporting philanthropic organizations, Timothy Higgins is an avid marathon runner and enjoys anything fitness related. He has found a way, through distance running to take his two greatest passions, helping others and fitness, and combine the two so that he can help those less fortunate, while pushing his fitness to the outer limits.

Marathon Training

There are eight "generally utilized" pace runs marathoners incorporate into their training regimens. Runners at any level should make use of each of these basic runs in order to diversify their workouts while preventing injury and overtraining. The recovery run, while generally a shorter run, is taken at a slower than usual pace in order to add mileage without "over doing it" after a period of more intense runs. A base run is also relatively short, though a bit longer than a recovery run, and involves one's "usual" running pace. While base runs, though not extremely challenging, make up the majority of a training regimen and allow marathon runners to establish a given "pace" while keeping up a certain level of fitness.

Conclusion

Long runs, on the other hand, require runners to distances not normally done during the course of everyday running. These distances are usually between 13 and 21 miles. Long runs leave runners fairly fatigued and are often more than double the length of a base run. The remaining five types of runs—fartleks, progression runs, hill repeats, tempo runs, and intervals—are composed of combinations, such as five miles at a marathon pace, followed by several miles at an easy pace.