You’ve spent months training for your fall marathon, so the thought of losing that hard-earned fitness after race day probably stings. But at the same time, you can’t simply continue logging miles and workouts like you’re in race mode. Trying to stay razor-sharp year-round can lead to injury and burnout; your body needs rest after training for peak fitness.
So, instead, put your marathon fitness on ice. Freeze the adaptations you’ve gained and the endurance you’ve built. Then, you can pick up where you left off on, say, January 1, or whenever it’s time to lock back in for a spring marathon.
If you train right in the weeks between now and the new year, you won’t feel like you’re rebuilding fitness from scratch. Instead, you’ll preserve the key aerobic, muscular, and endurance adaptations you’ve worked so hard to develop. To do that, we explain the minimum miles you need for maintenance and how speed, strength, and cross-training keep you in prime condition.
Expect to return to race training feeling well-rested, confident, and ready to tackle another marathon cycle this spring. In the first two weeks immediately following your marathon, you’ll want to focus more on rest and easy time-based jogging. Once you’ve recovered, however, you can return to tracking your miles more closely.
The bare minimum mileage you’ll need to maintain will vary from runner to runner, Heather Milton, CSCS, a clinical exercise physiologist and cofounder of Master My Run, tells Runner’s World. Much of it depends on how many miles you regularly put in over the weeks of your marathon training cycle. From her coaching experience, however, she’s found this number is likely around 50 percent of a runner’s typical weekly mileage.
David Hall, an RRCA- and USATF-certified run coach and founder of Running Coach CT, agrees. When planning his athletes’ schedules for the off-season, he looks at their typical running volume during marathon training and reduces their weekly mileage to no less than half. Every fourth week, however, mileage can drop to as low as 20 percent of their average to help facilitate recovery.
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