Marathon training has a new trendy topic: physiological resilience (and it’s not hype!).
As race day approaches, runners obsess over split times, taper protocols, and carbohydrate loading strategies. But there’s a concept gaining serious traction in elite coaching circles — one that may be just as important as VO2 max, lactate threshold, or running economy.
It’s called physiological resilience, and it could be the missing piece in your marathon puzzle.
For years, the dominant framework for understanding marathon fitness has centered on three pillars:
- VO2 max (your aerobic ceiling)
- Lactate threshold (the pace you can sustain before fatigue compounds)
- Running economy (how efficiently your body uses oxygen at a given speed)
Train these, the thinking goes, and your marathon performance will follow. That framework isn’t wrong — but it may be incomplete.
Physiological resilience describes something distinct: your body’s ability to maintain those fitness qualities under the prolonged metabolic stress of racing a marathon. It’s not just about how high your lactate threshold is at the start line. It’s about how much of that threshold is still functional at mile 20.
In the latest episode of the Strength Running Podcast, we discuss how we spend enormous energy building fitness, but far less thought goes into preventing that fitness from deteriorating on race day. Physiological resilience is the bridge between peak training fitness and the version of yourself that crosses the finish line.
This is why the concept is increasingly discussed alongside VO2 max and lactate threshold as a core marker of marathon readiness. You can arrive at the start line in the best shape of your life and still fall apart in the final miles — not because you didn’t train hard enough, but because you didn’t train specifically for the metabolic demands that erode performance late in a marathon.
Meet John Davis, PhD
John Davis is our guest, the kind of coach and researcher who bridges two worlds that don’t always talk to each other: rigorous exercise science and practical, on-the-ground coaching. His credentials span both worlds.
Davis holds a PhD from Indiana University’s School of Public Health, with a specialization in biomechanics and a research focus on running injuries. He’s not just an academic, though. Between 2013 and 2017, he served as an assistant cross country coach at Edina High School, where he helped the program qualify for the prestigious Nike Cross Country National Meet four consecutive years — a remarkable run of consistency at the high school level.
More recently, Davis has turned his coaching attention to elite marathoners, while continuing to work across the full spectrum of competitive runners. That breadth of experience — from high schoolers to elites, from laboratory research to race-day strategy — gives Davis a uniquely grounded perspective on endurance training.
He’s also a prolific author. His first book, Modern Training and Physiology for Middle and Long-Distance Runners, earned praise for distilling complex exercise science into practical, accessible principles.
His newest release, Marathon Excellence for Everyone: The Comprehensive, Evidence-Based Approach to Training and Racing, is one of the best running books I’ve ever read. It’s a dense, research-backed guide designed to serve everyone from first-time marathoners to athletes chasing world-class performances.
What We Discuss:
Subscribe to the Strength Running Podcast on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts to hear my full conversation with John Davis.
The conversation is wide-ranging, anchored by the theme of resilience but touching on several interconnected topics that any serious marathoner will find valuable.
What physiological resilience actually is. Davis breaks down the mechanics: specifically, how sustained marathon-pace effort gradually degrades your sustainable speed max, running economy, and VO2 max — and why building resilience means training your body to resist that degradation. This isn’t vague sports psychology. It’s physiology with a measurable, trainable mechanism.
How to build it. Davis walks through the training methods most effective for developing resilience, including the types of workouts and volume strategies that stress the body in marathon-specific ways. The goal isn’t just to simulate fatigue — it’s to teach your metabolic systems to function closer to their baseline even when glycogen is depleted and fatigue is compounding.
Last-minute resilience work. The episode is released in mid-October, with Philadelphia and New York marathons on the horizon. What if you’re running one of those races and you haven’t prioritized this kind of training? Davis addresses the question directly: is it too late, and what can a runner realistically accomplish in the final four to eight weeks?
The depletion workout debate. One of the more nuanced segments of the conversation involves so-called “depletion workouts” — training sessions intentionally performed in a glycogen-depleted state to stress fat metabolism and simulate late-race conditions.
It’s a practice that carries controversy, given the sport’s difficult history with disordered eating and the increasingly strong case for high-carbohydrate fueling strategies. We (hopefully!) navigate this tension thoughtfully, examining when depletion training might be appropriate and when it crosses into problematic territory.
The readiness question. I raise a concern I encounter regularly as a running coach: athletes who want to dive straight into marathon-specific training because they’ve signed up for a race, but who lack the aerobic base to handle it safely and productively.
I like to call the marathon the “final boss of road racing.” And the analogy is apt — the marathon is the 400-level seminar, the capstone course.
Because of its difficulty, it demands a foundation that not every registered runner has built. Davis offers practical guidance for coaches and self-coached athletes navigating this tension between ambition and readiness.
Why Physiological Resilience Matters
Marathon season is uniquely motivating. The combination of cooler temperatures, iconic races, and months of accumulated training creates a window where performance gains feel most tangible. But it’s also a period when runners are most vulnerable to strategic mistakes — over-racing, under-recovering, or arriving at the start line with fitness that can’t hold up to the distance.
The framing Davis brings to this conversation is a useful corrective. Most training philosophy is additive: do more intervals, add more mileage, hit this workout.
Physiological resilience asks a different question: when the race is hard and your body is breaking down, how much of your fitness actually survives?
That’s a question worth asking now, before race day arrives.
Subscribe to the Pod!
Episode 428 of the Strength Running Podcast features the full conversation with John Davis, including his detailed breakdown of resilience-building workouts, his thoughts on last-minute race preparation, and a broader discussion of what’s changed in his thinking about marathon training over the years.
You can find the Strength Running Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. For training programs, coaching resources, and past episodes on race strategy for New York and Philadelphia, visit strengthrunning.com.
Davis’s newest book, Marathon Excellence for Everyone, is available now.
The Strength Running Podcast is hosted by Jason Fitzgerald, a USATF-certified running coach, former collegiate athlete, and former columnist for Trail Runner Magazine. New episodes feature coaches, physical therapists, sports dietitians, sport psychologists, and other experts dedicated to helping everyday runners perform at their best.
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