Your marathon is set, and your goals are decided, but have you missed out these key steps that’ll make you more likely to reach those goals?

What I won’t go into here but is also important are the principles of setting your goal in the first place. From here I’ll assume you’ve set a good quality goal.

 

Post-marathon analysis

I can count on one hand the number of people I’ve spoken to who could give me any idea what their pacing was like during their last (or fastest) marathon, apart from the mile they hit the wall or began to struggle. Likewise with how many gels they took and at what times, or whether their pace dropped off on inclines to a justifiable extent. They don’t really know where they went right or wrong.

Without specific knowledge it’s understandable to a degree, but if you’re looking to really hunt down a time that will challenge you, this is where we start. Analyse your data so you know where to focus. If your pace dropped off a cliff whilst climbing any slight hill then you need to work on technique for hills. Taking in a gel every 8 miles and you can make significant improvement by changing your fueling strategy. There’s no judgement in anything I write here, but you have to know.

 

Action steps

With an in-depth or even cursory look over the numbers and charts available on Garmin Connect and Strava, you now know roughly where you can gain some easy time. What are you going to do with that knowledge? 

If your answer is that you’ll do something about it, then you’re on the right track, but you’re only part way there and still a long way from securing your success. You need an action plan. Specific steps to take you to your destination. Let’s look at an example and move it from an ineffective goal to something more actionable.

 

Better hill technique

Let’s stick with the idea of getting better on the hills as it’s something many of us don’t do as well as we could.

 

Unhelpful goal – I want to run uphill better.

Unhelpful action – I’ll run uphill more.

 

Better goal – I want to run uphill more easily.

Better actions – I’ll perform 1 hill session every 2 weeks. I’ll do some strength work to help with this.

 

Helpful goal – I want to be able to run uphill at my marathon pace for the equivalent of the hardest hill of the upcoming race. 

Helpful actions – I’ll perform 1 hill session every 2 weeks on hill “x”, aiming to run at marathon pace for 1 repetition more every time, building up to 8 repetitions. I’ll do strength work to help with this 2 times per week for 20-30 minutes. This will fit best into my typical week on Tuesday and Friday.

As you can see, the “helpful” goal and actions are much more specific. Decisions have been made (whilst still being flexible) which will give you smaller goals to achieve along the way, keeping motivation high as well as being a measuring stick for your adherence to the necessary actions for your marathon goal.

 

You would then repeat the process with each aspect you want to work on, providing clear details on what you want to achieve, how you’ll do it, when you want/need to be at certain points to be on track etc. The example above is far from complete in every detail, but it’ll be plenty to get you moving forward.

 

Set your goals then create clear actions so that your goals aren’t just pipedreams, but instead become memories of your favourite every marathon.

 

Written by Kyle Brooks, Running Coach based in Norwich, Norfolk