I wrote this initially for a group on facebook, after I kept seeing posts from people in the final stages of marathon training who were really struggling with their last few long runs. After replying - with essentially the same message - to a few posts I thought I'd share my questionable wisdom on why this can happen, in the hope it gives some perspective to people who are understandably demoralised.
Marathon training is a funny old thing. Elites would generally spend an "off season" building their volume up with relatively little intensity to give themselves a good base of fitness, before they even start on several months of preparation for actual races building in harder workouts. As amateurs we tend to cram the whole thing into 16 weeks using a plan off the internet. This plan will generally build mileage relatively quickly, and also often include some runs which will have harder elements such as hills or faster running.
We also make things more difficult for ourselves than we necessarily need to. Elites will do a large volume of training which is many minutes per mile slower than their race pace and there are really good reasons for this. As amateurs we tend to do our long runs faster than is ideal, and a lot nearer to our race pace.
The net result is that we get tired. Marathon training is tiring, and over time this mounts up. We never really recover from one run before we start the next and we start to feel cumulative fatigue. At first we don't really realise it. We've probably never heard of it. But cumulative fatigue creeps up on us like the sneaky little bugger it is, and one day we go out to do a long run which may be a little daunting anyway if it's our first marathon, possibly farther than we've ever run before, and we suddenly realise that we've only done three miles, there's a whooooolllle lot more to go, and we feel just awful. It makes no sense. How did we get so unfit? How did we get so bad at this? More importantly, how the bloody hell are we going to run 26.2 miles in four weeks time if today we are sobbing our way through the latter part of 18 or 20?
Most people who've run a marathon have been there to some degree.
Whether or not this way of training is good or bad is another discussion, personally it's not the way I'd do it again, but it's how most of us do it, and actually, it really does get better.
Firstly, we taper. That tiredness goes. Not straight away. A week in we're still bloody knackered and getting worried, but two or three weeks of lighter load and ideally taking relatively good care of ourselves, eating well, resting, our body recovers. During that recovery, we gain the fitness we've worked for but been too knackered to actually feel. We get to race day and if we've stuck to the tapering part of the plan like we stuck to the build up part of the plan, we suddenly feel really bloody boingy. Add in some adrenaline and we're like happy kangaroos on speed.
Then we need to have a damn good word with ourselves about not going off the start line like someone set a fire up our arses. Assuming we don't, we can run a good chunk of our marathon feeling actually pretty damn good. However, at some point, we will get tired, we'll start to hurt, because it's not easy.
This is the point at which that utterly awful run we hauled ourselves through, when we ran the last 10,12,14 miles feeling like we wanted to curl up and die, comes into play. We've been here before, we know what this feels like, and we know we can push through it, because we've done it before. Even if we didn't quite manage the full distance on a couple of our training runs, or we walked a bit, or we sat in a bus shelter and had a little cry for a while, we basically got through it. If we've felt this tiredness and got through it in training, we will get through it in a race.
So, shocking last long run? Don't worry. Have a big pie and a large glass of wine to celebrate getting through training, then do the good stuff for the last few weeks so you get there feeling fresh. If you've by and large done the miles and you get your rest in, you'll almost certainly manage it. There are always things that you can't predict (like falling over in a pothole when trying to grab jelly beans off a small child, I hear, a rumour, possibly, someone told me), but mostly you're probably going to be fine.
Enjoy. And stay away from small children bearing sweets. Seriously.
