An 18-week marathon guide built around your goal pace, with the theory to understand every session. Around 100 pages of plan, workouts, strength, fueling and race strategy.
Full description
There's often a gap between following a plan and running a good marathon, and it's mostly understanding of why you’re being asked to do things and how to course correct before things go wrong. Things like: why the easy runs have to stay easy. What threshold work is actually buying you. Why the phases arrive in the order they do.
This guide closes that gap while it trains you.
It starts by helping you set a goal pace you can genuinely hold, with a sense check that catches an optimistic one in week one rather than week sixteen. Almost every session is then anchored to that pace. The signature speed, hill, race-pace and long-run workouts come from blocks our own race team has run, each written out in full with intent, paces and recoveries specified.
Benchmark sessions repeat at four points across the build. Because the session never changes, your splits tell you plainly whether the training is working instead of leaving you to guess.
Around that sits everything a block needs and most plans skip: how to move sessions when life interferes, why deloads work and what they should feel like, taper theory, carbohydrate loading, gut training for the long run, and a race-day pacing plan. The strength and injury guidance comes from the physical therapists who treat runners at our clinics every week.
The block at a glance 18 weeks including taper and race week. Four to five runs, peaking at 47 to 49 miles, longest run 20 to 22. A weekly track session first, then race-pace work, with a second quality session as the block develops. Deloads every fourth week.
Who's behind it Atomic Track Club is one of Boulder's biggest run communities: 400-plus runners, 70 or more at the track each week, and a clear pathway from the community into our competitive race team. Runners who arrived with us in the threes have gone under three hours, some by a wide margin. Others have set personal bests at distances they thought they had left behind in college. This guide is built on the same structure.
Also inside: pace charts in miles and kilometers, heart-rate and effort zones, a printable log, and an online tracker pre-filled with every run.
An 18-week marathon guide built around your goal pace, with the theory to understand every session. Around 100 pages of plan, workouts, strength, fueling and race strategy.
Full description
There's often a gap between following a plan and running a good marathon, and it's mostly understanding of why you’re being asked to do things and how to course correct before things go wrong. Things like: why the easy runs have to stay easy. What threshold work is actually buying you. Why the phases arrive in the order they do.
This guide closes that gap while it trains you.
It starts by helping you set a goal pace you can genuinely hold, with a sense check that catches an optimistic one in week one rather than week sixteen. Almost every session is then anchored to that pace. The signature speed, hill, race-pace and long-run workouts come from blocks our own race team has run, each written out in full with intent, paces and recoveries specified.
Benchmark sessions repeat at four points across the build. Because the session never changes, your splits tell you plainly whether the training is working instead of leaving you to guess.
Around that sits everything a block needs and most plans skip: how to move sessions when life interferes, why deloads work and what they should feel like, taper theory, carbohydrate loading, gut training for the long run, and a race-day pacing plan. The strength and injury guidance comes from the physical therapists who treat runners at our clinics every week.
The block at a glance 18 weeks including taper and race week. Four to five runs, peaking at 47 to 49 miles, longest run 20 to 22. A weekly track session first, then race-pace work, with a second quality session as the block develops. Deloads every fourth week.
Who's behind it Atomic Track Club is one of Boulder's biggest run communities: 400-plus runners, 70 or more at the track each week, and a clear pathway from the community into our competitive race team. Runners who arrived with us in the threes have gone under three hours, some by a wide margin. Others have set personal bests at distances they thought they had left behind in college. This guide is built on the same structure.
Also inside: pace charts in miles and kilometers, heart-rate and effort zones, a printable log, and an online tracker pre-filled with every run.
