You shouldn’t copy the workouts of the world’s best marathoners. But there’s a lot to learn from elite marathon workouts!
Episode 478 of the Strength Running Podcast features Brant Stachel, a mental performance coach, registered psychotherapist, and former professional triathlete who coaches Thomas Nobbs, a 2:09 Canadian marathoner (Canada’s 4th fastest marathoner ever!).
The core idea of the episode is that elite marathon workouts are worth studying (for general lessons, direction, and structure) but dangerous to copy. While you shouldn’t copy the sessions, you should learn more about the purpose behind these sessions.
The podcast conversation centers around four elite marathon workouts and a method for scaling each one to your own fitness.
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Don’t Copy Elite Marathon Workouts…
Elite athletes are, by definition, different from the rest of us. Yes, they run faster. But they also recover faster, run far more volume, and carry a level of durability that took a decade or more to build.
Durability – in this case, your injury resiliency – is what gets amateur runners into trouble. A workout is not just a set of reps and recoveries and paces. It is the visible tip of an iceberg that includes years of accumulated mileage, a training age measured in decades, a high running economy, and a life arranged around recovery.
When you copy the workout without the iceberg underneath it, you are not training like an elite. You are just running a session you have not earned.
So the goal of my conversation with coach Brant Stachel is not to hand you four elite marathon workouts to run next week. It’s to show you what each session is actually trying to accomplish, so you can build your own version at your own fitness level and still get the physiological benefits that the pro’s get.
To do that, I brought on a running coach who writes these workouts for a living.
Brant Stachel: Marathon Coach & Psychotherapist
Brant Stachel has one of the widest-ranging backgrounds of anyone I have had on the Strength Running Podcast. He is a…
- mental performance coach
- registered psychotherapist
- former professional triathlete
- massage therapist
- served four times as a national team coach for Team Canada
- coaches Thomas Nobbs, a 2:09 Canadian marathoner and #4 all-time for Canadian men marathoners
He is also the author of Fast and Free: Mindset Training for Endurance Athletes.
I’m always on the lookout for guests that combine multiple professional sources of expertise.
Brant is not only prescribing workouts based on a physiology lesson he learned in a textbook 20 years ago. He’s thinking about what a session demands of an athlete mentally, what it costs them psychologically, and whether they are ready to absorb it.
He uses his background as a national team coach, psychotherapist, and former pro athlete to guide his runners beyond just prescribing workouts. Brant’s perspective is more holistic, well-rounded, and comprehensive.
4 Elite Marathon Workouts
These are the four elite marathon workouts shared by coach Brant Stachel on this episode of the podcast.
3 x 10k @ MP with 1k Float
After a 20–30 minute warm-up, pros run 3 x 10k at marathon pace with a 1k float recovery at the fast end of easy pace. It’s important not to dawdle on this recovery and truly run a high Zone 2 pace for the 1k recovery segment.
This workout is obviously too difficult for most of us mere mortals! An elite runner might spend about 90 minutes at goal pace while a 4-hour marathoner would spend almost double that time at goal pace.
How to scale this workout: Brant advises modifying this session to a 2.5 hour long run that alternates 30 minutes of easy running with 30 minutes at goal marathon pace.
It can be done in the middle of a training cycle to find your true, more accurate marathon pace. Before attempting a workout of this quality, it’s best to do two or three long runs of about 2.5 hours at an easy effort and one 60+ minute continuous run at marathon pace.
Mile On, Mile Off
This is the American version of Renato Canova’s 10-12 x 1k on/1k off. An elite runner will spend two hours alternating one mile at marathon pace with one mile at easy pace.
How to scale this workout: we can stick with 5 minutes at marathon pace with 5 minutes easy. This gives us a total of 1 hour of running at marathon pace but in short intervals that teach us patience and how to control our effort in shorter reps.
This workout can be done early in the training cycle as a learning opportunity: shorter repetitions at goal pace require us to be more vigilant about pacing and not running too fast.
6-5-4-3-2k Cutdown
This elite marathon workout is a cutdown ladder of 6k, 5k, 4k, 3k, and 2k with a 1k float in between at the high end of Zone 2 (easy, but not a “recovery” pace). The repetition length is not the only thing that gets cut down in this elite marathon workout: so does the pace.
The goal is to cut down to half marathon race pace by the final repetition. And the reason why there’s no 1k segment at the end? It’s too easy to run it too fast!
How to scale this workout: Convert the distances to time and run 30, 25, 20, 15, and 10 minutes while progressing to half marathon pace only if you are very fit and the workout is going well.
This session can be placed roughly in the middle of a marathon training cycle.
90-100 Minutes at Goal Pace
This is Brant’s favorite! This is like a full dress rehearsal for the marathon and should be done about 3-4 weeks before race day with the same gear, shoes, breakfast, terrain, and fueling plan as the race itself.
How to scale this workout: This is the one training session that works well for everyone – and in fact, recreational runners might get more out of it than elites! So there’s no need to modify this workout based on your finish time.
It’s possibly the best predictor workout: if you can run 90+ minutes at goal pace, that means your pacing is likely realistic and you can hit your goal time on race day.
Marathon Workout Philosophy
I want you to know how to build your own marathon workouts based on where you’re at with your current fitness level. If that sounds boring, I can help you with that.
If not, use these four ideas to thrive:
You have to earn a workout
Every hard session has prerequisites – and they are not optional! Before you attempt a long marathon-specific workout, you should have the aerobic base to absorb it, recent experience with the individual pieces of the workout, and a training history that says your body can handle the total load.
Running a workout you haven’t earned isn’t impressive; it contributes to over-training syndrome and can actually set you back.
Scale the purpose, not the pace or volume
The most common mistake is to take an elite session and simply run it slower. That often preserves the duration while destroying the stimulus, or preserves the intensity while making the volume unsurvivable.
Instead, try to truly understand what the session is designed to accomplish (ask your coach or a fellow running nerd!). If the purpose is to practice running goal pace on tired legs, you can cut the total volume in half and still get it. If the purpose is a long aerobic stimulus, you can soften the pace and keep the duration.
Remember that a workout, a long run, and a long run workout are three different things. They have different purposes, different recovery costs, and different places in a training week. Collapsing them into one category is how runners end up doing too much quality and never truly recovering.
For more on long run physiology and strategy, listen to my conversation with ultra runner and coach David Roche here.
Finally, recognize that you have to respect the recovery cost of any run – and long run workouts with significant bouts at goal pace require substantial recovery. Elite athletes can absorb these sessions partly because recovery is their job. They laze about in between training sessions and don’t have the same demands on their bodies as the rest of us mere mortals!
For age-groupers and recreational runners, the honest question before any big workout is not whether we can complete it, but whether we can complete it and still train well three days later.
Take the Guesswork Out of Your Training
Building your own marathon workouts is a skill, and this episode is meant to help you develop it. But if you would rather not write your own sessions, I’ve already done that work for you.
Our training programs schedule the right workout at the right time, with the volume and intensity matched to your current fitness rather than someone else’s. You can browse all of our training programs and coaching services at strengthrunning.com/coaching/.
You can listen to my full conversation with Brant Stachel on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you prefer to listen.
