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24 Week Beginner Marathon Plan

  • Creator
    Topic
  • July 27, 2020 at 10:45 pm #43910
    Caroline
    Participant

    Hi,

    I have 3 questions about the 24 week beginner marathon plan:

    1) When it says road or flat trail, how flat are we talking? I would like to say run parts of the Wildwood Trail in Forest Park in Portland. (Recently I have been running on flat roads during the week and hiking in the Columbia Gorge and up easier Oregon Cascade mountains. My running mileage is a bit low at the moment, so I will probably even take a few weeks to build up to the first week of this plan.)

    2) What’s the best way to incorporate some casual weekend hikes with friends? I don’t want to give these up.

    3) Thinking forward to my future goals, it would be helpful if I could do a pull-up, which I can’t right now. Would it be reasonable to add in 1-2 ~45 minute strength sessions to work towards this? Or just leave it for later?

    Thanks!

  • Creator
    Topic

Posted In: Mountain Running

  • Inactive
    Anonymous on July 30, 2020 at 11:04 am #43968

    I’ll ask our head coach about the intent of the flat runs.

    2) I would include them in your training logs. They won’t be helpful for training (well, maybe the descents for the impact), but you need to track them for the fatigue that they will contribute. If you use Training Peaks, their fatigue metrics will give you a good idea of this.

    3) If it’s just a pull up you’re after, you won’t need 45-minute sessions, and I don’t think it’ll impact your run training. Check out the pull-up routine in our first book, Training for the New Alpinism.

    Inactive
    Anonymous on July 30, 2020 at 1:26 pm #43977

    Caroline:

    What I meant by flat trail marathon would be on terrain that you can run all the time. Not so steep you need to walk to stay in Z1-2. This will typically be about a maximum of 500 feet/mile of gain and loss. 0r a bit less that a 10% average grade. Forrest park is a great resource to have right in town. It will be a good place for this training.

    I agree with Scott S on point two:

    Track your hikes as training.

    If you are struggling with your first pull up then you certainly do not need or want 45min/session. You’re prob not ready for the Pull Up program Scott suggest till you can do at least one pull up. My best luck for people learning to do a pull up is to first start with hanging from the bar and doing scapula retractions. This means pulling you shoulder blades down and together without beding your arms trying to pull up. This is the most important part to learn correctly so you do not risk hurting yourself. Here’s a video showing what scap retraction looks like when hanging from a bar.

    For pull ups you should start with band assisted pull ups as per this video:

    Thanks for writing to us.

    Scott

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