Running your first marathon comes with a mix of emotions that tend to swing between excitement and fear. But with the right training and preparation, the marathon should be an exciting and satisfying (if challenging) journey to the finish line.
“Approach the race with joy and gratitude, not as a life-or-death thing,” says Molly Seidel, an Olympic Marathon medalist. “A lot of people are overly serious, but you can still be focused and have fun with it.”
So take a deep breath, and read on for our best tips, tricks, and expert advice to help you sail through 26.2
The Complete Guide to Crushing Your First Marathon Starts Here
- The Golden Rules of First-time Marathon Training
- Our Favorite Marathon Gear
- How to Avoid the Dreaded Wall
- Pros Tell Us Their Pre-26.2 Rituals
- Is the 20-mile Training Run Overrated?
- The Best Marathons to Get Hooked on 26.2
- I Feared the Marathon. Then I Ran It Anyway.
The Golden Rules of First-time Marathon Training
Give Yourself 20 Weeks to Train
Beginners should start training 20 weeks out from the race, says Andrew Kastor, coach of the Asics Mammoth Track Club in Mammoth Lakes, California. This 4.5-month-long training cycle builds up your endurance and aerobic capacity—the secret sauce in a marathon.
“A lot of people could go out there and drag themselves through a 5K, but it’s much harder to do a marathon if you haven’t put in the work,” says Rob Watson, ex-pro marathoner and head coach forMile2Marathon in Vancouver, British Columbia. “The more time you give yourself to do it, the more prepared you will be on race day. You don’t want to cram for a marathon.”
Get Comfortable Running at Least 18 Miles
Long runs accomplish two things, says Kastor. “Number one: gain confidence. And number two: train your body to recognize what it’s like to run on fatigued legs—because when you get about 20 miles into a marathon, your legs are like stubs.”
Slowly build up to 18 to 20 miles for two long runs, Kastor says. At the start of your training cycle, take your most recent long run and alternate adding one and two miles each week, until you hit at least 18 miles. (So if your longest run is 10 miles, run 11 the next week, then 13, then 14, and so on.)
After you hit at least 18, step down to about 13 miles for three weeks, Kastor says. Then go back up for one more 18-miler to close out the training cycle.
Find a Support System
Working with a running group or a coach by your side will help you go the distance. “Sometimes you’re pushing the group, and sometimes you’re getting pulled along,” Watson says. “But either way, your training partners are right next to you, breathing and working just as hard.” Ask your local running store or search social media to help you find the right crew.
Working with others can also give you accountability, structure, and confidence. “A marathon buildup on paper could look perfect, but when it comes down to actually doing it, you might get sick, have work stress, or have life stress,” Watson says. “You’re going to have to change your plan, and your coach’s experience can guide you through it, while giving you the confidence that you’re still doing it right.”
Take Two Days a Week Off From Running
“You need to allow your body time to adapt,” Watson says. A day without running may not feel productive, but your body is recuperating from any minor muscle tears or tissue damage that’s occurred during your training and getting used to the strength you’ve built up. Plus, it allows your mind to reset, too, and keep your motivation high. It all adds up to a faster race time.
New marathoners should dedicate one day to a cross-training activity like biking, swimming, or yoga, Kastor says, and take a full day off each week. On these rest days, foam-roll, stretch, eat well, sleep well, and let your mind and body heal from the stress of marathon training.
Add Marathon Pace to Select Long Runs
Race-day success, Kastor says, “comes down to the long runs, training, and getting used to the pace.” Run six to eight miles at marathon pace during your long runs. As your body gets more familiar with race pace, it also becomes more efficient at it. It will also get used to the pace on already-tired legs.
Schedule just two or three of these marathon-pace long runs during your training cycle, says Jeff Gaudette, a coach and former Hansons-Brooks Original Distance Project pro runner. And spread them out by at least two weeks, with the last one occurring no closer than three weeks before your race.
Another option for an 18- to 20-miler with marathon pace is a progressive long run, Gaudette says. Take the first couple miles easy, then miles 4 to 12 at 15 seconds slower than goal marathon pace, miles 12 to 18 at goal pace, and the last 8 miles at 10 seconds faster than goal pace. This run is best implemented in the final eight weeks of your training plan.
Many beginners feel nervous about running out of energy before they make it to the finish line. The progressive long run is one of the best ways, Gaudette says, to train your body and mind to push through the hardest part of the race: the last few miles. This is also a good option for runners using longer training plans to help reinvigorate your marathon prep leading up to race day.
Train for the Course
The best way to prepare for a race’s unique challenges is by running the course. But if that’s not possible, checkout the topography. “It’s about being prepared, controlling the controllable,” Watson says. “Take the Berlin Marathon versus the New York City Marathon. They’re both 26.2 miles, but Berlin is pancake flat, so you just have to practice sticking to a pace, whereas NYChas a lot more hills, so you have to prepare for the ups and downs.”
For hilly courses, Kastor recommends simply routing your long runs over a few hills. “If you’re training in Kansas for a hilly marathon, you might have to get creative with it,” Kastor says. “Run up parking structures, do stairs, or go to an athletic club and bump up the incline on the treadmill.”—Ally Spiroff
Our Favorite Marathon Gear
OPTP Pro-Roller Soft Density Foam Roller
The 36-inch length makes it easy to reach those sore muscles without having to reposition the roller. Choose the “super soft” barrel density if you prefer a gentler massage.
Coros PACE 2 Premium GPS Sport Watch
A pure running watch—at a great price—with 30 hours of juice in GPS mode to outlast any long run.
Supergoop! PLAY Everyday SPF 30 Lotion
Even if the skies are overcast, you can get a wicked burn running for three+ hours. This sweat- and-waterproof formula incorporates moisturizing, vitamin E–rich sunflower extract in a travel-friendly size to get you from the TSA checkpoint to the finish line.
Untapped Maple Syrup Athletic Fuel
The best alternative we’ve found if you think regular GU is too thick and gummies are tough to chew. The salted raspberry flavor is *chef’s kiss*.
Smartwool Run Zero Cushion Ankle Socks
Sweat-wicking merino wool helps prevent blisters and is thin enough to fit comfortably inside your snug race-day Vaporflys. This slightly taller cuff height offers some extra coverage in case you kick your ankles when your form starts flagging.
How to Avoid the Dreaded Wall
The marathon wall: When your legs can barely move, you feel like you’re crawling, battling your mind over your body. You’re bonking. It even happens to pros, like Keira D’Amato, the American record holder in the marathon until Emily Sisson bested the mark at the Chicago Marathon, who bonked around mile 20 of her first marathon in 2013 and had to walk most of her last six miles.
Bonking happens when your body runs out of glycogen, which is energy stored in your muscles and liver, says Alison Helms, Ph.D., a certified personal trainer and creator of the Women’s Running Academy.
Our bodies store about 2,200 calories in glycogen, which is good for about 18 to 20 miles. Once your body’s main fuel source is gone, your brain “wants you to stop and turns on all the signals,” Helms says. You may cramp up, feel fatigued, or even have GI problems.
Bonking may be common, but it’s far from inevitable if you fuel properly and run smart.
Start Refueling as Early as 20 Minutes In
“If you run out of carb stores, it’s really hard to get them back,” says Kastor. So take in your fuel before you need it—as early as 20 minutes into the race. And aim to take in 30 to 60 grams of carbohydrates—or two energy gels—every hour during the race.
Dehydration can be just as nasty as—and more dangerous than—bonking, so combine your fluid intake with your gels, says Monica Reinagel, a sports nutritionist based in Baltimore, taking one to two cups of the water or sports drink on offer at every aid station along the course.
Plan Out and Practice Refueling
Kastor has his athletes find out what fuel and fluids will be served along the course to help them gauge how much nutrition they need to carry. Then they train with those exact products and flavors throughout their training cycles.
If you do need to supplement the aid stations, make sure you have room to carry your fuel. Watson recommends storing your gels in fuel belts, pockets, sports bra, or arm warmers.
And practice your fuel plan during long training runs to make sure your stomach can handle it, that your gear is comfortable, and that you’re able to get food into your mouth while running.
Check Your Pace Regularly
Kastor recommends checking your pace around the first 5K—are you going too fast? “It’s not too late to slow down” at this point, he says. If you get to mile 10 and already feel like you’ve been pushing too hard, “chances are pretty high that you’ll hit a wall,” says Diane Nukuri, an Olympic Marathoner for Burundi and three-time top-eight finisher at a World Major Marathon.
“If you get to 30K feeling good,” Kastor says, “I give everyone the green light to pick it up by 5 to 15 seconds per mile, and try and hold that pace all the way to the finish line. You can make up a couple minutes in the last few miles.”
Focus on You
Your brain is busy during a run, monitoring blood volume, sweat rates, core temperature, blood sugar, and stress hormones, says Dan Benardot, author of Nutrition for Serious Athletes. “Mental fatigue will lead to the perception of muscle fatigue.”
It comes down to mind over matter, says Christian Zepp, Ph.D., sports scientist and sports psychology expert. Visualize “positive alternatives to the wall, such as anticipating a runner’s high at certain mile markers,” Zepp says.
Shift your focus internally and use positive self-talk to motivate yourself back on track, he added. Tell yourself to keep calm or focus on highly specific aspects of the race, like your running form or the specific pace for the current mile you’re in, until you pass the wall by.
Carb-Load the Week Before
In the week leading up to the race, 70 percent of your total calories should come from carbs, Helms says. (For a 150-pound runner eating 2,700 calories a day, for example, that’s about 450g of carbs.) Two to three days before the race, increase to 80 to 90 percent from carbs (for that same runner, that’s 540 to 850 grams of carbs). Bread, pasta, oats, and rice are all solid carb-loading choices. —A.S.
Pros Tell Us Their Pre-26.2 Rituals
Dakotah Lindwurm
“I braid my hair down my back, a tradition for me every race since my first race as a freshman in high school. I eat oatmeal, peanut butter, and a banana roughly two and a half hours before the race starts.”
Elkanah Kibet
“The day before, I drink water early in the morning and all afternoon, but no more water by 6 p.m. so I can sleep at night. I eat at least two hours before the race.”
Nico Montañez
“I wear these specific blue socks with black trim, eat a bagel and peanut butter the morning of the race, eat a Chipotle steak burrito the night before, and check three times that I have every-thing in my bag for race day.”
–As Told to Ally Spiroff
Is the 20-mile Training Run Overrated?
During their training cycles, many coaches—including most featured here—tell their athletes to hit 20 miles at least once. “There’s a big psychological benefit on race day to completing the 20-mile training run,”Kastor says. It’s a major confidence booster, Watson agrees. But is 20 really a magic number?
“It’s just a round number,” says Kevin Hanson, coach and co-author of Hansons Marathon Method. The book and method have guided thousands of amateur runners to marathon finish lines with training plans that never ask for more than a 16-mile long run.
“The biggest drawback to our plan is convincing people that 20 is just a number,” he says. The Hansons method prioritizes consistent work over the course of a week to build overall mileage, rather than emphasizing one extra-long workout in a week.
A 20-mile run is also overkill for many new marathoners. For runners averaging 10-minute miles, a 20-miler will take almost 3.5 hours. “Running over three hours for a training run has shown to have a diminishing point of returns,” says Roberta Groner, a coach for Central Park Track Club in New York City and a pro-marathoner.
Hanson also has his athletes practice their marathon pace over and over again, both “on days when you’re tired and on days when you’re hungrier than you should be at the start.” This way, they get used to running on sore legs as well as holding back when fresh. “Often times training plans have you take the day off before a20-miler, which is like a mini taper,” Hanson says. Instead, Hanson wants your long run to feel like a simulation of the end of the race, when your legs are really feeling the fatigue.
So should we all for-sake the 20-miler? Not if you enjoy that style of training plan or it works better for your schedule. Programs featuring a handful of long runs in the neighborhood of 20 miles are more feasible for the runner who amps up their training on the weekends, Kastor says.
Or, if you’re the type of runner who wants to spread their training evenly across the weeks—like Groner, who found the Hansons method was better for her as she was raising young kids—then dive into the Hansons approach. —A.S.
The Best Marathons to Get Hooked on 26.2
Athens Marathon
📍Athens, Greece 📅 November
Athens is home to both the legend of the marathon and the first marathon race—held in 1896 to open the Olympics’ modern era. Soak in the history of the ancient city, which culminates in a finish line at the marble Panathenaic Stadium (rebuilt in A.D. 144).
Big Sur International Marathon
📍Monterey, California 📅 April
Roll through this scenic, point-to-point course that runs along the Pacific Coast from Big Sur to Carmel. The hills make it a slower route, but the beauty of the towering redwoods, crashing waves, and coastal mountains is unmatched.
Eugene Marathon
📍Eugene, Oregon 📅 April
Nicknamed TrackTownUSA, Eugene is a city of running diehards. Although there’s a hill at mile eight, you’ll breeze through 26.2 on the otherwise fast and scenic Willamette River trails—the old stomping grounds of legendary runner Steve Prefontaine—and finish on the iconic Hayward Field track.
Grandma's Marathon
📍Duluth, Minnesota 📅 June
The views of Lake Superior along a largely flat and fast course draw more than 20,000 new and veteran marathoners alike to the lakeside port of Duluth. Expect locals to show up in force cheering runners over the one notable bump, Lemon Drop Hill, and through the finish line.
Indianapolis Monumental Marathon
📍Indianapolis, Indiana 📅 November
This pancake-flat course is beloved for its sheer speed. The early-November timing makes for a cool, colorful fall marathon as you zip through Indy neighborhoods.
Vermont City Marathon
📍Burlington, Vermont 📅 May
Vermont is a friendly place. You feel that along the even, clover-shaped course when you hear excited spectators throughout the charming Burlington streets, along Lake Champlain. Then dig into some celebratory Ben & Jerry’s at the finish line. —A.S.
I Feared the Marathon. Then I Ran It Anyway.
A human being in this modern world has plenty to worry about: societal collapse, environmental disaster, any number of future Batman reboots. But there are some possibilities that we fail to consider, fears we don’t know we have until they move into our heads, and then we are immediately envious of our earlier, untroubled selves.
What I’m saying is, I didn’t appreciate signing up for my first marathon and then finding out my toenails might fall off.
A first marathon is an intimidating task for even a seasoned runner. For the rest of us, the race date looms on the calendar and stirs up fears new and old, well-founded and implausible. We are correct to have concerns when we take on our first marathon, and we are correct to have even more serious concerns once we fully comprehend what we’ve gotten ourselves into. In a sense, conquering those concerns is the real challenge a first-time marathon runner must face. But if I can do it, so can you.
When I signed up to do my first, I was aware that the training process would be a grueling one. I knew to anticipate sore knees and tight hips. It’s supposed to be nearly impossible; remember, the race gets its name from the story of Philippides, a Greek messenger who ran the 26-ish miles from Marathon to Athens in order to announce his army’s victory over the Persians, and then died right after. I knew not to expect an extra-long walk in the park, and if the paintings and sculptures are to be believed, young Phil was ripped, so what chance did I have? Plus, I’d chosen the New York City Marathon, the most popular one in the world, the one in the city where I’d spent my whole twenties, which raised the equally gruesome possibility that I might be seen at my pinkest and most vulnerable by thousands of spectators, including people I might have dated.
When I started telling people I was thinking about doing a marathon, I received nothing but encouragement. But when I actually signed up for it, the very moment my payment was processed and it was too late to turn back, that’s when I started hearing the stories. The friend from college whose nipples started bleeding at mile 14. The beloved uncle who lost control of his bowels at mile 23. And the toenails. So many lost toenails. The images that played in my mind were bone-chilling. I knew that I would be pushing my body to its very limits, but I had not considered specifically how my body might push back.
And there was no escape. I’d already told everyone I’d ever met that I was doing the New York City Marathon, and the costs of hiring extras, building sets, and staging a fake one for a photo shoot were prohibitive. The only available exit was on the other side of the finish line. I was going to have to do the damn thing.
What saved me was remembering my why. I hadn’t signed up for a marathon out of a deep love for running, or competition, or registration fees. I had signed up for a challenge. I’d settled into a satisfying professional life, and I found myself choosing to do the things I knew I could do well, and delegating or declining the rest. My vanity and pride had begun to deny me the simple thrill of slowly learning how to do something new. My soul craved the experience of completing a task in November that I could not possibly have completed in May. We need these things. They keep us growing.
As I trained, I found that those grisly physical complications weren’t what I was worried about anyway. Those were just the surface fears, the ones I was more comfortable engaging with. And honestly, they’re pretty easy to avoid: lube up those nips, eat sensibly in the days before the race, make sure you have access to a toilet that morning, and you’re good to go. (There’s not much you can do about the toenails.)
There’s nowhere to go but inward when everyone else is in bed and you’re running an 18-miler. When I was alone out on the road and the fatigue had worn down my defenses, I found I’d been masking my real fears, and those were much more disturbing: What if I couldn’t actually do what I set out to do? What if this made me take a good honest look at my physical limitations? What if I could have done it last year, but sometime between then and now I began my inevitable physical decline?
What if I’m just not good enough? What if I never was? Failure is a valuable opportunity for growth and self-knowledge, and it absolutely fucking sucks. Nobody wants to fail, or fall, or give up, or be forced by paramedics to give up, and for sure nobody wants to do those things in front of thousands of spectators with cowbells and Bloody Marys. A marathon is a challenge, a real challenge, and real challenges are terrifying. There’s just no getting around it.
The answer is to put one foot in front of the other. Here’s what I did: I called my friends who had come to cheer, and I asked them to put themselves somewhere between mile 20 and the finish line, that 6.2-mile mystery zone that you don’t train for. I knew I’d need encouragement then, and I knew it would need to be from familiar faces. I also gave them strict instructions not to tell me I looked good. “We will both know you are lying,” I said, “and it will make us all feel bad.”
But the most important thing that I did was to train properly, and then trust it. Trust myself. This is the magic bullet, I’m afraid: Do the training diligently, let it ruin a few months’ worth of weekend mornings, and that’s how you buy yourself a smooth race day. You overcome your worst fears that way. You might even have fun. Just take it one step at a time.
Ultimately, I only lost two toenails. They grew back. Pretty painless, really. —Dave Holmes
Dave Holmes is Esquire's L.A.-based editor-at-large. His first book, "Party of One," is out now.
