Training for a Marathon

Last fall, I ran a half-marathon for the Silicon Valley Marathon on a due to that being one of my life goals. I wanted to run both a half-marathon and full marathon by...a certain age. This year, I've been training more seriously for a full marathon--the Nike Women's Marathon in San Francisco in mid-October. The differences involved in the training is clearly drastic. Unlikely, too, is the chance that I'd be able to cram jogging 42.195 kilometres (26 miles and 385 yards) in about a month, like I did with the half-marathon without injury, with a full marathon.

These past 2.5 months, I've been either waking up very early (5:30 am ~ 7:00 am) to squeeze in a minimum 1 hr run before work--at least 3x per week; or if I overslept, push the run to in the evening after work. Whereas for the last race, I could run in the local community college/high school track or in the gym--I cannot do the same for a full marathon except for warming up. Annoyingly, I found out most gym tread mills have a maximum time limit of 1 hour for a training program (and technically I was only allowed to hog the same tread mill for 3o min. max). And with a track, it was easy for me to lose count of how many laps I ran around it. It reached a point where I've found measuring myself by time versus distance is a better gauge of my ability. So lately, I've been pushing my training onto running trails.

Here were some of the main tips that I learned in my training:

• Wearing the proper-fitting clothing and shoes (get your stride/pronation measured by professionals in a specialized running store) really does matter. Runners should get a half size larger shoe for running shoes due to the feet needing space for movement. I was starting to get blisters on my toes in my simple trainer Rykä shoes due to my feet variously hitting the front of the shoe when I ran more than 7 miles. I picked up Nike Zoom Structure Triax+13 Breathe that provided good stability and padding for my feet type.
• Wear sunblock or a cap when outside (self-explanatory).
• Control breathing to slow, deep breathing--panting only wears out the runner faster
• Take glucosamine chondroitin if having joint issues.
• Transfer weight evenly in feet when running; no landing on heel or ball of foot.
• Keep the body and arms relaxed, any unnecessary tensing of muscles uses energy inefficiently
• Drink a moderate amount of water before running

I found The Los Gatos Creek Trail was part of the 2009 Silicon Valley Marathon course and provides nice, gradual inclines to train with for the more tricky hills in SF. I suppose if I was more of an intense runner, I should pick up a GPS watch to track my pace--but I figure for now, I'm going to keep to the core basics.