The Run Down

For most marathoners, race day is more about competing against yourself—making it through 26.2 miles or finishing in your fastest time—than the thousands of other competitors in the race. Afterall, for the majority of people, even athletes, running 26.2 miles is hard and requires intense training and careful planning to avoid burning out early, sustaining injury, or hitting the infamous wall.

Even the most prepared runners have to climb the wall between miles 18 and 21 when the body’s glycogen—the carbohydrate store in your muscle tissue that gets converted into glucose for energy—gets drastically depleted and your body cries uncle. At that point in the marathon, it becomes mind over muscle.

Although there’s no way to avoid the this part of the race (other than catching a cab from 18 to 21) you can prepare your body to work through it, which will get you to the finish line faster and with less pain. For help, we turned to Kelli Hein, trainer at downtown Dallas Super Sport in Dallas. Hein has run six marathons, including the 2007 San Diego Marathon in which she ran fast enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon. Now she has her sights set on breaking 3 hours and trying to train for the Olympic marathon trials in 2012.

But before Hein ever reached this elite status, she almost gave up on 26.2 altogether. After hitting the wall in her first marathon in 2005, she had no desire to run another. But in 2007, after she started running with one of her clients, she began to reconsider and discovered ways to ready her body for what she knew it would face on race day.

Here she shares some simple things she’s learned about speeding up without burning out.

Keep time (and expectations) in check

Are you keeping regular, honest, tabs on your training? If you can’t answer with a solid “yes,” it’s time to start clocking each run and making notes after each workout. This is simple enough that we shouldn’t have to remind you, but it’s the foundation of finding your speed. If you have some money to drop, make this process a no-brainer by investing in a Nike+ for an iPod nano, or—better yet—a small GPS to track your pace and distance, so you can keep track without it feeling like an inconvenience.

Once you become a better time keeper, if you find that you’re running 9-minute miles and really hope to run a 7-minute mile on race day, don’t fool yourself by saying that adrenaline will take you there. “You’re not going to magically drop 2 minutes,” Hein says. But there are things she recommends to do in your training to give yourself a surefire boost: On your long run days during the week—starting off at about 10 miles and working up to 20 miles in about 12 weeks—run every other mile at a faster pace. Just like shorter interval training, you’ll be training your muscles how to kick it up.

Gym prep

While it’s a given that running will be your main focus, if you don’t do any supplemental exercises you are missing out on so many chances to strengthen and fine tune your form.

Get balanced: First have a trainer do a fitness assessment on you (this can be done for free) to help you figure out any imbalances that may be keeping you from reaching your top speed. “I see a lot of severe postural imbalances and muscle deviations,” Hein says. “Even if you’re a great runner, if you fix those you’ll be even better.” Once you know which muscles are overactive and underactive, you can start to target them in the gym. Since you are not going to be looking to put on mass, start with 3 sets of 15 for any corrective exercises recommended.

Core: Since power for all exercise is generated from the core, make sure you hit this area in the gym with exercises such as a medicine ball crunch or a reverse crunch or try a fitness class. The core is the structure that holds you up, and if you have a weak core you aren’t going to generate as much power when you run long. Remember that your abs are also a glycogen store, and you want your body to pull from these muscles to help bide you some time against the wall.  For more core exercises, check out Build Your Core.

Legs: Keep up with squats, single-leg squats, and leg extension curls to prepare you for kicking into anaerobic occasionally on the hills. See our shorter-distances speed-training plan titled Speed Racer for some great exercises for runners.

Stretching: Don’t slack off with your stretching. It’s crucial to help keep you injury free. Pay special attention to your calves and quads.

Rest days: In your schedule make sure you have an off day and a cross-train day—can be anything from cycling to swimming—to let your body recover from all that repetitive pavement pounding.

Start slow

Well not slow, per se, but just on pace for the time you need during the marathon. If you run much faster than your training speed, you greatly increase your odds of running out of juice in the second half. If you want to pick it up, tell yourself that you’ll do that after mile 13. While Hein wouldn’t recommend such a dramatic change in pace, she ran the San Diego Marathon with her client for the first half in about 2 hours and then picked it up to complete the second half in about an hour and a half. If you find yourself overly rearing to go in the beginning, just remind yourself that you can give an added push later.

Structured Eating

When nearing your race day, start eating, drinking, and supplementing exactly the way you plan to during the marathon. Hein learned this lesson the hard way. When she ran her first marathon, she drank Gatorade even though she had never trained with it. It was too rich for her stomach and she found herself running off to the bathroom several times during the run.

Your eating and drinking preparations should also include figuring out how much carbo-loading, or lack thereof, is right for you. Hein no longer worries about loading up on spaghetti dinner. She just eats how she would normally and opts for just half a bagel before the marathon. “When I binge eat carbs before races, it makes me feel so bloated, I might as well be rolled to the start,” she says. Instead, she recommends eating as you normally would and putting much more focus on hydration.

Get in tune

Although your body and mind aren’t as sharp toward the end of the race, Hein says you have to be aware of how your body feels. “When you hit the wall it’s more your central nervous system than your muscles,” Hein says. And according to a University of Capetown study, she may be right: Researchers had athletes work out until they reached the wall, then artificially stimulated muscles. The muscles continued to twitch—they had some glycogen left for use. Another study showed no difference in glycogen stores among athletes after 3 hours vs. 4 hours.

So what gives? While you may think it’s your muscles screaming to your mind, it may in fact be more of you brain telling your body to stop.

So if your mind starts playing tricks on you, play tricks on your mind. Hein says she gets a song stuck in her head and sings it over and over as a distraction. She also writes initials on her shoes and will glance down when she’s in desperate need of motivation. One of her favorites is DGU (don’t give up). While all this sounds simple or even a little silly, it may be one of the most underutilized strategies to help get you through in time.

Of the 57 runners surveyed in the Journal of Applied Sport Psychology who had completed an average of 10 marathons each, only 51 percent said they used cognitive strategies to cope with the wall. One 32-year-old runner said: “Sometimes I focus on a runner near me or ahead of me and hope that the runner can pull me through. I don’t think these strategies really get you through the wall—when it’s there it’s there to stay—but it does help you keep up a faster pace than if you continue to think about how miserable you feel, in which case you will just keep going slower and slower.”

Whatever your mental strategy may be, whether it’s getting yourself from light pole to light pole or repeating a personal mantra, figure out something you are going to do to help distract you when you’re struggling at the wall, or anytime you need a boost during the marathon. If it gives you the edge, who cares how silly it may sound?