Old Fashioned Marathon Training

Finisher's shirts from my first two marathons

Wow, I recently realized that the time it took me to run/walk sixteen miles last Saturday (2 hours and 53 minutes) was almost the amount of time it used to take me to do my longest runs while preparing for a marathon. If I remember correctly from training for my first marathon, the training plan only called for a three hour run as the longest. The reason was that if you can run for three hours, you can certainly finish a marathon. This was before GPS watches and runners only relied on an ordinary watch. Nowadays training plans call for twenty to twenty two miles as the longest runs and for slower runners that could take more than three hours. The three hour long run has taken a lot of runners using the old Honolulu Marathon Training Plan to the finish line and my old booklet from 1980 even says that a long run of fourteen miles is enough to finish a marathon. I don’t know if Honolulu’s finishers marathon plan is still the same today but it used to be that you would progress by increasing your long runs by thirty minutes every two weeks until you reached three hours, regardless of distance. As recently as five years ago that was the kind of marathon training I was doing and it enabled me to finish twenty five marathons. I can’t run marathons anymore because of my tendon problems, but it just surprised me that I was able to run/walk for almost three hours last Saturday.