Dear Coach: I am planning to run the Marine Corps Marathon this fall for the third time. When should I begin my long runs and how fast should I run them? Jim

Dear Jim: There are many different ways that you can train for a marathon and be successful. Conventional wisdom has runners starting with long runs 10-12 miles four to five months before the marathon and slowly building up to three or four long runs of 20 miles or more in the last couple of months before the marathon. This is the best approach because the gradual increase in distance enables your body to adjust to the pounding of the long runs. My own experience is that post-marathon recovery is faster because of the mileage base being built during this training.

But we don't live in an ideal world. The problem with beginning Marine Corps training five months before the race is that much of the training occurs as the heat and humidity descends upon the D.C. area. It means that you will probably be doing three months of distance training in normally very tough conditions. It is unlikely that we will have a repeat of last summer's mild weather. To avoid the dangers of overtraining in D.C. summers, I recommend that you train with a heart monitor and keep both your long runs and easy days under 70% of maximum heart rate for most of the run (2 minutes per mile slower than 10K race pace). Otherwise, those long runs will take a toll on your body and come the fall you will be overtrained and may not run a very fast marathon. Before I began training with a heart monitor, I learned this lesson the hard way by not slowing down enough during the summer and entering the fall pretty tired, resulting in unsatisfactory results at several Marine Corps marathons.

Most veteran marathoners would be better served by keeping their June and July runs in the 12-14 mile range and instead concentrating on anaerobic threshold training in those months. You should be able to run a successful marathon on 3-4 long runs of 17-22 miles when that training is combined with marathon pace work and other speed training. In fact, I once ran a personal best marathon on only two training runs in excess of 12 miles (a 15 and 17 miler), but I was in the best 10K racing shape of my life. I don't recommend doing that because it took me a long time to recover from that marathon.

It is also very important to taper for 3-4 weeks before the marathon in order to let your body recover from the rigorous training you have put it through. Your last 20 miler should be run 3-4 weeks before the marathon. Too many runners are afraid they will get out of shape if they start decreasing their mileage, so they don't begin tapering until two weeks before the marathon. It is particularly a problem with the date of the Marine Corps Marathon because we start to get some cool fall days in October, which present a real temptation to runners who have gotten used to logging many miles each week. Remember, if you fail to taper properly, chances are that you will start the race in a fatigued state and find yourself running out of gas at the 20 mile mark. You also run the risk of a post-marathon injury

Kirt West is available to coach adult runners who wish to better their performances. Contact Kirt at Kirt West or phone the Washington Running Report at (301)871-0005.