A recent study of how Boston
Marathon qualifiers train contains a seeming contradiction.
The more you train in the four months leading up to the
event, the faster you’ll race. So far, so obvious.
But if you increase your training in those final fourth
months compared to the preceding eight months, you’ll
race more slowly. Reconciling those two observations leads
to some important insights about what it takes to run
your best marathon—insights that extend beyond the
narrow question of how to plan your taper.
What the study found
The new research was published in the
journal Sports Medicine by a team led by Alexandra DeJong
Lempke (and including Canadian researcher Trent Stellingwerff
of the Canadian Sport Institute Pacific). They surveyed
a total of 917 athletes competing in the 2022 edition
of the Boston Marathon, collecting data on their training
history and race performances. The key comparison was
between their training from 12 to four months before their
race, and during the last four months before the race.
(So, the eight months leading up to their four-month buildup,
and the build itself.)
The basic results were unsurprising: training
more makes you faster. More total mileage, a greater number
of runs per week, more easy running, more hard workouts—in
broad strokes, for this particular group of runners (whose
average race times were 3:53 for women and 3:35 for men),
more was always better. That was true for the year leading
up to the race, and for the four months leading up to
it.
For the researchers, the interesting question
was how training would change in the final four months.
There are various theories of periodization—that
is, of how your training should evolve as you approach
a race. The traditional “linear” view is that
you gradually decrease your mileage and do more speedwork
as the big day approaches. Alternately, “reverse”
periodization calls for increased mileage and less speedwork
in the final months.
On average, the runners in the study didn’t
seem to be following either approach. In the final four
months before the race, they increased their number of
runs per week from 5.0 to 5.3, consistent with linear
periodization. But they also increased their number of
hard workouts per week from 1.7 to 1.8, as you’d
expect with reverse periodization. Rather than any particular
form of sophisticated periodization, this seems more like
cramming for an exam: the closer the race gets, the more
of everything they’re doing.
This is an understandable impulse. Who
among us hasn’t glanced at the calendar, counted
the remaining weeks before a big race, and resolved to
ramp up our training efforts? But for the runners in this
study, it didn’t pay off. All else being equal,
those who reduced their training frequency in the final
four months ended up racing faster than those who maintained
or increased their training frequency. When we think of
tapering for a race, we’re usually talking about
a one- to three-week reduction in training volume. In
this case, backing off over a four-month period paid off—or
at least, that’s how it appears.
What the findings actually mean
Here’s the message you definitely
shouldn’t take from these findings: that, begnning
four months before your marathon, you should start slacking
off and training less. Recall that doing more frequent
runs, higher mileage and more hard workouts in the final
four months predicted faster finishing times in Boston.
And these factors had a stronger effect than the benefits
of reducing training in the final four months. This is
the apparent contradiction in the findings, and it leaves
us with a dilemma about whether we should increase or
decrease training over the final few months.
But we’re asking the wrong question
here. It’s not about what we do in the final four
months; it’s about what we’ve done in the
preceding eight months. Those who could afford to back
off in the final four months tended to be the ones who
had already accumulated big miles over many months. The
most important insight from Lempke’s data, then,
is that playing the long game pays off for marathoners.
Training for a marathon, especially at
the level required to qualify for Boston, is a constant
game of risk and reward. More mileage and faster paces
get you fitter, but they also raise the ever-present risk
of injury, overtraining and burnout. Getting that balance
precisely right—as fit as possible on race morning
without being overcooked or carrying nagging aches and
pains—is a challenge even for the best marathoners
in the world, who are training full-time and whose every
twitch is carefully monitored and analyzed by coaches
and physiologists. For the rest of us, who are balancing
family and work responsibilities and making our own training
decisions, it’s a black art.
Neither this study nor any other can say
whether you, individually, should increase or decrease
your training in the final months before a race. If you
haven’t been training particularly hard but are
now motivated for a big goal, the benefits of continuing
to ramp up four months out probably outweigh the risks
of overdoing it. But if you’ve spent a year building
toward Boston or some other goal race, stacking together
weeks and months of consistent training, Lempke’s
findings suggest that it pays to be cautious—to
resist the temptation to keep pushing harder and harder,
and to avoid digging yourself into a hole.
More generally, the study reinforces one
of the most familiar training clichés, which is
that we tend to overestimate what we can achieve in the
short term but underestimate what we can do in the long
term. It’s certainly possible to run a good marathon
by putting in four months of hard work. But to run a great
marathon—one that truly reflects what you’re
capable of—you’ll need a year, or perhaps
a lifetime.
Alex Hutchinson is a Toronto journalist
specializing in the science of running and other endurance
sports. His latest book is The Explorer’s Gene:
Why We Seek Big Challenges, New Flavors, and the Blank
Spots on the Map.
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