Mystique of the marathon

There is a mystique around marathon running that is difficult to explain. After all what is special about running for 26.2 miles?

* it is a long way
* most people struggle to run for the bus
* how can you run that far without going for a whiz?
(Actually there are usually restrooms/portable toilets available, or if not you can go behind a bush. In fact Paula Radcliffe made a very public toilet stop one year in the London marathon.)

But, the popularity of marathon running is a very recent phenomenon. It has only been in the last 30 years that thousands upon thousands of people have felt the need to run for 3 to 6 hours. Of course the world record is now 2 hours 3 mins and so many seconds, but going sub 3 hours for most runners is a huge challenge.

In the 1960s when Ron Hill was taking on the world at long distance running people didn't jump into running marathons straightaway. They honed their speed over shorter distances first, and only stepped up to the full marathon distance at a later date. (As an aside I remember when I was at university people thought I was mad because I wanted to run marathons, and many runners said that I would become slow by running marathons! Perhaps i should have concentrated more on developing my speed at that point, but just because you run 26.2 miles or 50 miles one time in a race does not mean you will become slow. If you want to speed up just change your training routine.)

This is the way more people should approach marathon running -- get as fast as you can over 10ks then take that fitness into a marathon. Of course you can run marathons at the same time -- ie you don't need to wait years to run your first marathon, but give yourself a proper build up to the race, and do your 10k training throughout the rest of the year. By this I mean you should use the periodisation techniques of top runners - so you have easy weeks factored into your training, as well as mileage build up weeks for example.