How to improve your marathon time 

Choose the right race

If you are looking to go quick, a hilly course might not suit your needs. Something flat and wide would be an ideal location to set a best time or launch your marathon career. When you’re doing your research, check the average temperature for that race over the previous 10 years. You don’t want to see months of training unravel because you didn’t realise just how hot the race was at that time of year.

Inspiration factor

When you’re choosing your race, think about the number of people who’ll be watching. When you have to pick up the pace with 6 miles (9.6km) to go, will you be spurred on by the roar of 10,000 people en route, or will two men and a dog be watching? Drawing inspiration from a crowd and a big field of runners, who might just drag you through the closing stages, can make all the difference.

Pick the right plan

The training programme has to be right for you, so be realistic about what time you can achieve. Either as a novice or a marathon regular, you know what you’re capable of in terms of a target time, so don’t be over-ambitious.

Don’t let your training drop off

The mistake a lot of first time marathon runners make, is to let their training drop off completely for several weeks and months after their first big race. The running shoes and training kit are packed carefully away and as their enthusiasm for running disappears, so does the enormous bank of aerobic fitness they had built up. That means when they start a training programme for their second marathon, they are effectively starting from scratch. Treat your first attempt at a marathon as a base and build on it as soon as you’ve recovered from your first race. It will help you run faster.

Think about dropping down/back a distance

This can help some runners who have hit a plateau in terms of their marathon times. If you drop down to half marathon or 10k races and concentrate on running them faster, it will give you a base for sustaining a faster pace over longer distances when you step back up to marathons. It will also give you a mental break and add some variety to your running.

Speed work

There is no getting away from it. If you want to get faster you have to run faster. That means putting yourself through the lactate barrier to achieve your goal. Interval, fartlek and tempo training are the way to go, as all will boost your speed.

Tempo runs

This can be characterized as running at a sustained speed which is comfortably hard. So instead of a leisurely chat as you go through the miles (kilometres) on your long run, conversation dries up on a tempo run. You are aiming to run at your lactate threshold. In other words, your body is just about able to get rid of the lactic acid you are generating. If you go too fast, the lactic builds up in your muscles and slows you down. But if you don’t run fast enough, you aren’t training at your optimum. For the marathon, an ideal tempo run would be 8-10 miles (13-16km) at something approaching 10k-half marathon pace. That might be 10-30-seconds a mile (1.6km) slower than your 10k pace, but faster than your long run pace.

Interval training is not unlike tempo training, but the distances covered tend to be shorter. Break down your sessions into blocks of distance and then run one block (a mile or 1.6km for example) at an easy pace, recover, then run the same distance at race pace, recover and then run another mile (1.6km) at above race pace before recovering. Then repeat that series, two or three times. The more running you can do at a pace which is faster than your marathon aim, the greater the chance you have of achieving a quicker overall time.

Fartlek training

Fartlek training is not unlike interval training but generally more unstructured. It means speed play in Swedish and in terms of your training, the idea is to alternate your speed between sprints and slow jogs during your run. You can suddenly inject a burst of speed for an unspecified amount of time, which could be deciding to sprint from one end of the road to the other in a middle of an easy section. The emphasis is on flexibility in terms of structure and changes of pace, which is designed to increase speed and fitness.

Hill work

This will strengthen your legs and get you ready for the inevitable pain that running a marathon can bring. Some coaches recommend hill training in the early phases of training, as it will build your aerobic base and give you stamina. You will rely on that when the going gets tough on marathon day.

Quantity not quality

The idea is to make every mile/km count by running less often, but longer when you do. So rather than two shorter runs on successive days, try a longer run on one day and then have a rest day on the other. It can work as a successful strategy for some runners, so it might be worth considering.

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