Marathon Training Principles

The Last Man Standing race of 42 miles that Richard Joseph Spinelli finished came without any formal preparation, which sets it apart from the structured build up that the research on distance training describes. For most people who enter a marathon, preparation is the larger part of the undertaking, and a growing body of studies has tried to measure which parts of it matter. Long distance running has grown sharply in popularity over recent decades: 15,450 athletes ran the Rotterdam Marathon in 2017, against only 200 in 1981.¹ Traditional marathon preparation leans on two things, a high weekly volume and long endurance runs, and the studies below test how far each one actually shapes the result. Each section takes one finding. The entry deals with preparation only; what happens on race day is covered under marathon pacing and negative splits, and the distance itself under the marathon.

Weekly volume and finish time

One attempt to link volume, finish time and injury within a single group of amateurs came from researchers at Erasmus MC University Medical Center in Rotterdam. They surveyed 441 people entered in the Rotterdam Marathon and 556 entered in a half marathon in The Hague, both in 2017, with three questionnaires spread across the build up and the days after the race.¹ The work sat inside a trial of an online injury prevention program which, because the program made no difference to injuries, could be treated as a plain cohort.

Among the marathon runners, averaging under 40 km a week, about 25 miles, went with a slower finish, and averaging over 65 km, about 40 miles, went with a faster one.¹ The link held after the analysis accounted for training pace, and the correlation between how far people ran and how fast they trained turned out to be weak. The authors read this to mean that finish time depends on both quantities together, not on either alone. That answers, at least for amateurs, the common question of how many miles a week marathon preparation needs: the evidence favors more than 25 and points to benefits beyond 40.

The longest run

The same Dutch data examined the single longest run each person completed before race day. For marathoners, a longest run shorter than 25 km, a little over 15 miles, was tied to a slower finish.¹ The benefit did not keep climbing, however. Runners whose longest outing went beyond 35 km did no better than those who topped out between 30 and 35 km, so the authors concluded that a run past 35 km, about 22 miles, does not appear necessary for a fast result.¹

The study also looked for a cost and did not find one. Neither high volume nor long runs showed any link with running injuries in either group of racers, marathon or half.¹ The authors were careful about this. Few marathoners sat in the highest volume and longest run groups, and earlier studies had found more injuries above certain weekly totals, so the relationship may depend on how quickly volume is built rather than on the total alone. They also noted a Dutch trend toward preparing with intense sessions and no run longer than 14 km, which its advocates said lowered injury risk without slowing anyone down, and the study was designed in part to test whether that approach works as well as claimed.

Frequency and speed

A second study took a different approach. Rather than surveying hundreds of racers, it brought 97 recreational marathoners into the laboratory, 34 women and 63 men with an average age of about 42, and tested each on a treadmill for lactate threshold, running economy and maximal oxygen uptake.² Every participant also described a normal training week: distance, frequency, the longest run and the pace of the sessions. The runners were then sorted into five bands by marathon time, from two and a half to three hours at the quick end to more than four and a half hours at the slow end.

The fastest band trained more often than the runners finishing between three and a half and four hours and those beyond four and a half hours, and covered more ground per session, about 16 km on average against about 10 km for the slowest band.² Race speed tracked closely with the speed at the first lactate threshold and, more loosely, with distance per session. The authors named training frequency and absolute training speed as the two habits that best separated the bands.² From the relationship between aerobic capacity and training load, they also suggested a floor of roughly 15 km per session and about 56 km a week, some 35 miles, for developing oxygen uptake.

Taken together with the Dutch findings, the laboratory results point in one direction. Runners who train often, run reasonably far each time and include some faster work tend to finish faster, at least within these amateur groups. Neither study claims these habits guarantee a time; both describe associations across groups, and the Dutch authors call for further work on how quickly weekly volume should rise. Coaching advice in the running press follows the same line. Runner’s World suggests progression long runs that begin slower than goal pace and quicken every 5K.⁶ Its UK edition recommends regular runs held at marathon pace, so that the effort feels familiar well before race day.⁷

First attempts and the limits of preparation

The research frames preparation as a matter of degree, but history shows the distance can be finished, and even won, without the usual rehearsal. As Britannica records, it was long assumed that anyone attempting a marathon first had to train over the full distance.³ At the 1952 Olympic Games, the Czech runner Emil Zátopek set an Olympic record of 2 hours 23 minutes 3.2 seconds even though the race was the first marathon of that runner’s career.³ Other first time marathoners went on to win major races and set records in the decades that followed.

That history bears on a question many beginners ask: can someone run a marathon without training? The evidence above suggests the finish time will suffer, since low volume and a short longest run both went with slower results. It does not suggest the distance is impossible. By the late twentieth century, road racing and the marathon in particular had become a recreational activity with wide appeal, drawing large fields of runners whose preparation varies enormously.³ The Guardian observed in 2025 that many newer runners look for the shortest route from the couch to a marathon, a distance once thought superhuman.⁵ The Austin American Statesman reported the same year that running clubs and young first timers were swelling marathon fields, with whole clubs now training together for one race.⁴ For a race like the Austin Marathon, those fields include first timers alongside runners chasing a specific pace. Other sporting subjects on this site are gathered on the interests page, which also leads to tennis and the US Open.