Last December I had the greatest luck to receive my invitation for the 51st Berlin Marathon this September. This is the first full marathon of my life so I wanted to make sure that I do not come unprepared for this challenge and to arrive at the starting line without any injuries.
Table of Contents
Why did I sign up?
I have been running consistently (meaning at least two to three times a week) since 2017 and after numerous half-marathon races in the last five years I decided to check one item from my bucket list - the full marathon. I am not a fast runner (for me a half-marathon personal record of less than 90 minutes at least) but I felt like I needed to expand my horizons and this goal is a perfect opportunity.
I made a promise to myself that if I ever get accepted for the 51st Berlin Marathon, then I will do it which actually happened. There will be no turning backs and I have to show up there in Tiergarten on the third Sunday of September.
Preparations
I started with two training plans over the winter and spring months: “Base Training: Building Up to 45 Miles (72 km) per Week” from Pete Pfitzinger and Philip Latter’s “Fast Road Racing: 5K to Half Marathon” and “5K Schedule 2: 45 to 55 Miles (71-88 km) per Week” from the same book. The purpose was to slowly increase my distance per week and transition safely to a 5km training plan to increase my speed. I got all of these from helpful comments over at Reddit who recommended lowering one’s 5km and/or 10km times during off-season before entering a full marathon block mirroring a common collegiate track and field athlete’s schedule.
Both have been genuinely helpful for me despite the ice on the roads during winter, the constant need to find shoes that my running form will like and sometimes sickness. I learned a lot of lessons not only from running wisely but most importantly my own body’s as well - sleeping eight hours a night, to skip a workout if a part of the leg is sore and to “keep easy days easy and hard days hard” among others.
Why Pfitz 18/55?
Pfitz’s 5km plan was tough both physically and mentally but I enjoyed the variety of workouts resulting to a 19:54 personal best. There was no doubt that I need to follow a marathon plan by the same coaches.
One of the things I found out about myself from the 5km plan was that I got better at long runs (16km or above by this time) and even enjoyed them. There was I time that I dreaded doing them the night and now I’m looking forward to every Sunday morning. Pfitz had a lot of these and it is the main reason why I wanted to continue the philosophy for my first marathon.
By the end of my 5km plan my weekly distance was around 60-70km. I used this as guidance to which Pfitz plan to choose and 18/55 (18 weeks of weekly distance up to 55mi/90km) was the safest. I wanted to push my luck for 18/70 but I realised I was not ready for the first Sunday long run at 24km. On the other hand, the 19km target for 18/55 was long enough to be hard but achieveable for my current fitness. Again I had to remind myself that I need to be at the starting line and to not cancel due to injuries from overtraining.
I have the book which has a lot of answers to questions and topics such as how to execute the workouts in the plans, what execises to do to strengthen the legs during off days and how to handle nutrition during the plan. It contains all the existing plans for both 12 and 18 weeks from 55mi/90km to 107mi/172km per week as reference.
I also wanted to physically track my workouts by writing them in a calendar-like copy of the plan and I used defy.org that has a variety of running plans from base building up to marathons to generate a CSV file that I loaded to a spreadsheet document. Through this I can keep myself accountable and have something to look forward to each day.
Tomorrow is the first day and should just be a rest or cross-traing day so I will just do yoga and mobility drills to keep my legs and feet stable and strong.
What’s next
I plan to add weekly posts here containing a summary report of what I completed in the week. What happened in quality workouts that I wanted to highlight regardless if positive or negative; observations about changes in my running and overall fitness and a bit about the shoes I use.