How to Train for a Half Marathon – Endurance
Obviously, the biggest part of training for a half marathon is actually running 13.1 miles so it is important to include long runs within your training schedule.
However, before we look at the kind of long runs you should be doing, let’s look at a really important element of your training…
A lot of runners simply don’t do a proper warm up or just start their run with a “slow jog” before picking up the pace or, even worse, don’t do any warm up at all and just go straight into their run.
This is a recipe for disaster, potentially leading to pulled muscles, as well as other injuries. The purpose of a structured warm up is to prepare the body for what it is about to do and, by warming up correctly, you minimise the chances of injuries occurring.
When you finish this short warm up drill you should be breathing a little heavier and your lower body muscles will be warmed up correctly for your run, so you are ready to go!
So, now you are nice and warm let’s look at the long steady runs you should be doing as you train for your half marathon.
You should start with a 10-12 week training schedule in order to give you enough time to train properly and your first “long run” should be no longer than you have run before, so you don’t push it too far initially.
In the first 2-3 weeks aim for 2 long runs each week (we will be looking at the other types of training runs to do in future posts). For the purposes of this schedule we will say that your long run is 4 miles.
So, a sample “Long Run” training schedule could look something like this:
In this training plan, week 12 is the week of the race so you would look to run 4-5 miles by Wednesday or Thursday at the latest, assuming the day of the run is a Sunday. There is no need to run the 13.1 miles before the day of the race but it’s always good to have 2 or 3 11 mile training runs under your belt.
