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Marathon Training - Building Endurance


Sunday


Besides the pure mental challenge, the other biggest part of training for your first marathon is just building up your physical and aerobic endurance to be able to go the entire marathon distance of 26.2 miles.  I try to keep all of my non-speed building training session well within my aerobic threshold.  To find that threshold I have used the 180 formula.  This formula essentially takes 180 minus your age plus or minus 5 for different things to find your ideal maximum aerobic heart rate.  At the age of 50, that makes my ideal heart rate 130 bpm.  What I have noticed on my long runs is that I have been able to keep my heart rate below 130 at the same pace for longer and longer distances.  The only down side for me, at this point in my training is that to keep my heart rate below 130, I have to run at what seems like a really slow pace of around 11 to 14 minutes per mile depending on whether I believe the numbers from Strava or Samsung Health.  In the next week or so I am going to be doing some speed work at our local high school track and I'll be tracking my time with a stop watch to see what my actual pace is.  I'll let you know which one is more accurate Strava or Samsung Health. Another side benefit that I have noticed since increasing my weekly mileage and running  five days a week is that my blood pressure has come down about 5 mmHg for both the top and bottom numbers.  My lowest blood presure since starting the marathon training is 106/68.  This is down from my highest blood pressure of around 150/95, which is where I was at when I first started my Keto lifestyle.  Just doing keto,  which helped reduce my weight, and reduce internal inflammation and also practicing some mental and spiritual calming techniques reduced my blood pressure to around 120/80 to 115/75.  To measure my heart rate, most of the time I just use my Samsung Sports watch.  I also have a Wahoo chest strap heart rate monitor that I use occasionally.  My only complaint with using the Wahoo device is that sometimes I have problems with getting my watch or phone to connect to it reliably.  This ends up wasting a lot of my precious morning training time trying to get all the techno stuff working.

The one lesson to learn from training for a marathon is daily consistency slowly build progress is key to achieving your goals.  

Everyday, one step farther and one second faster.


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