There are two camps when training for your 1st half or full marathon – Racers and Runners.
Racers are people who are concerned about things like time, speed, pace, personal bests, trying harder.
Runners are people who are concerned about things like experience, fun, enjoyment, exhilaration, trying easier.

As you can see there is a fundamental difference in these two approaches. And the different philosophies result in fundamental differences in the approach to running .

Most running programs are actually racing programs designed by racers. You will often find that top athletes have designed them, and what is the common factor of top athletes? Time. They are top because they were the best. They ran the fastest, they had the best time. And so this philosophy pervades all of their advice, all of their training programs. The training program will have sections dealing with “pace”, “improving your speed”, “achieving your personal best”, “racing faster”, “speed work”, “fartleks” (yeah we know that sounds bad but it is a real running term that means speed play).

But there is another way and another philosophy and its called running easy. This is different to racers and it is also different to jogging, which if you training for a half or full marathon you move beyond. Jogging is what you see people doing at the park with the dog. Joggers are those people who casually toy with running. They run a few kilometers every now and then, but nothing more than that. Often they know very little about running, and in fact often spend most of their life struggling to develop the core cardio fitness and never moving beyond that zone. However once you start training for your 1st half or full marathon you are no longer a jogger – you are now a runner.

There are 2 main parts to fitness – well actually there are 5 parts – Cardiorespiratory, Muscular strength, Muscular endurance, Physical flexibility, Body composition – but we need to keep this simple and useful. You’re not going to be jogging along the road thinking about the crossover point between your cardiorespiratory gain and body composition. More likely you’re puffing and wheezing and got sore muscles. But you could simplify it down to two elements;
- Cardio Fitness – that’s the huffing part.
- Structural Fitness – that’s the aching parts.
Cardio fitness is to do with the fitness of your heart and lungs – essentially it is how efficient they are. After all we basically need air to live and do everything. If the big pump (heart) and air reservoir (lungs) are optimized then your cardiovascular fitness is operating well and running (or any exercise) will feel easy.

Structural Fitness is the condition of your muscles, joints and all the other parts of your body that are doing all the moving when the Cardio engine is pumping.
It is a lack of Cardio fitness that makes most non-runners feel that it must be impossible to run anything more than a couple of kilometers, let alone a marathon. “Hang! I’m huffing and panting just when I get up from the dinner table, and sweating like a Turkish wrestler after walking up the road, there is just no way I could run a half or full marathon!” The hardest part of training is developing the cardio fitness. But the good news is that this fitness is quickly acquired and by Week 2 or 3 of a half or full marathon training program (assuming you started with the required 5km (3 mile) core fitness the cardio fitness required by most marathon training programs issues will be minimal.
By the time you develop your marathon fitness your cardio fitness feels easier and easier, and with rest your structural fitness also starts to feel easier, making running a marathon or half marathon much easier than what most non-runners are led to believe.

“Well done on completing your first Marathon!”

These are words that to many seem like a distant dream, a far-off vision, but once you have made a decision to run a marathon. You have joined a program. You have joined a group of people who are all determined to try and reach the same goal your vision becomes a reality

Although it seems like it is a far-off goal -you will get there, just stick with the program, stick with a group, and you will experience the indescribable joy of completing your first marathon – when these 7 words will not simply be words but a huge sense of achievement, smothered in amazing emotions!

Available statistics report that only 1% of people in the USA have run a marathon. This is likely even lower in other countries. So your decision to run your 1st marathon and successfully achieve this goal would put you amongst a very small minority of the population. Yet, the reason so few people have done it is not because it is impossible, but rather that too many people simply don’t believe that they are capable of the extraordinary.

As you know there are many, many people in the world who have great plans, who dream of doing extraordinary things – but so many never do anything about it. You are not one of them. Once you’ve made a decision to run a marathon you start pursuing what may feel like a huge and unachievable goal. It will be a huge goal and you may doubt yourself. Others will certainly doubt you. But whatever happens, if you just stick with the plan, accept help along the way, share your thoughts, doubts, insights, and joys with the other runners – you WILL run your first marathon. You WILL experience the extraordinary in you.

Yours in Running Easy
Craig & Nicky
http://www.runningeasy.com