When should I run a marathon before an IRONMAN?
In this latest article, Coach Philip looks at whether or not it is practical to put a marathon into an IRONMAN Training programme. This is a common conversation with athletes, so we outline some of the considerations below.
As we reach the end of a season, we start to look at next year. Invariably, people look at two options: going further or going faster.
Going faster is one of the exciting parts. You have a lot of knowledge about what you have done, what your opposition has done, and what historically is faster for that next step, be that breaking 3 hours or breaking 2 hours for an Olympic distance race. The parameters are pretty clear. Equally, what you need to work on is evident when you look internally. You may have a significant swim or bike deficit that needs to be addressed. The subsequent path of moving your CSS from A to B is much more straightforward.
However, stepping up a distance opens many more questions than solutions. Basically, you have never done what you are asking yourself to do before. You don't know how you need to train to do it, and you do not know how your body will respond. There are a lot of situations where you need to hypothesise what will happen rather than know what needs to be done.
Experience and evidence-based methodology will help you build your training plan, so you are physiologically ready to step up. However, that doesn't solely manage the psychological impact of racing something longer.
This leads us to a common problem for those who step up to IRONMAN. They sign up for a summer race and think they "need" to do a spring marathon. This article covers this well. In summary, that won't work! Equally, this article adds some further points too.
As we can now understand, doing a marathon is more of a psychological need to calm nerves about an IRONMAN than a physiological advantage. Therefore, when should you put a marathon in if you can't manage without doing one?
This answer is a little more complicated and probably limits you more than you realise. Instead of doing an IRONMAN next year, look at it as a two-season build. One of the best times to do a marathon is actually at the end of your season. Therefore, completing a 70.3-distance race and rolling into a marathon will give you a chance to focus, undistracted, on a marathon. You will have transferable fitness for a fat marathon (a 70.3 and a marathon are quite similar in their physiological impact and training approach), and you will have a positive mental experience of a marathon.
For the reasons posed in the links above, doing a marathon within a few months of an IRONMAN limits your training beforehand and means a less good triathlon outcome. Therefore, if you can plan for a two-season IRONMAN build if you feel you need to do a marathon before an IRONMAN, this gives you an obvious structure to build training in and means you can focus on each of the sports entirely. It also gives you the time to recover from marathon training which can take up to a month, and then build the training for IRONMAN really effectively with an excellent running base.
That said, you don't need to run a marathon before an IRONMAN. It is a very different type of race: an IRONMAN Marathon is much slower and not as comparable to a pure marathon "sprint". The training needed for one is very different, too. There are significant crossovers in fitness from the bike and the swim, which means the need to run further is less, which means there is a very atypical marathon training approach for an IRONMAN athlete. Especially as many people doing their first IRONMAN will find themselves happy to walk or planning a walk-run strategy at various points in the race.
So the question ultimately falls to whether or not you want the confidence of having "run" the distance under your belt before you start. In which case, choose when you do your marathon very carefully and consider a two-year IRONMAN build instead of trying to do it all in one year. It is asking a lot of a body which is already exploring a new distance and all the other unknowns that come with that.
Philip is the founder of Tri Training Harder LLP. He’s a British Triathlon Level 3 coach, and has been coaching for over a decade and is involved with mentoring and developing other coaches.
Philip has have coached athletes to European and World AG wins, elite racing, many Kona qualifications, IRONMAN podiums and AG wins.
Alongside the conventional development through many CPD courses, he has also been fortunate enough to work alongside experts in the fields of Physiotherapy, Strength and Conditioning, Nutrition, Psychology, Biomechanics, Sports Medicine. Putting this knowledge into practice he has worked with thousands of athletes to various degrees, from training camps in Portugal and around Europe, clinics in the UK and online coaching.
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