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So, one of your goals this year is to run a marathon? This is quite a task and it will take more than keeping in shape and watching what you eat if you are serious about achieving it. To train effectively for this goal, you must have a well thought out and coherent plan that will bring you gradually to the right fitness levels. This holds true for all fitness level you are at. So how do you go about training for a marathon?

Well the best advice for doing this is to break your training down into different phases. What each phase entails, and how much time you spend on each phase depends heavily on your current fitness level. It will also depend on how much time you have to prepare yourself. Obviously if have a year to prepare yourself, your training regime will be different than if you only have two months.

What most professional marathon runners advise, is that regardless of your fitness level, you will want to break your training into various phases. One aspect of each phase will be that you will want to bring your running ability up to the twenty six mile length of a marathon. This will usually be more of an issue for beginners than for more seasoned runners. However, it is a major issue for beginning runners as many people can hardly run one mile, never mind twenty six of them right after each other!

A good example would be if you had twenty six weeks to prepare. Then you could aim to go for a long run once a week, which would gradually increase, perhaps by a mile each week, until the end when you could run at least twenty miles. This would not be the only aspect of your training, but it would be one way of ensuring that you had the stamina and energy to run the entire length of a marathon.

As well as worrying about the length of you running capability, you have to make sure that you are running every day. Of course, you will take rest days, and you may even rotate your training so that you are only running say five days a week. The other two days you should be exercising your upper body. However, the important point to remember is that you should have a regime and stick to it.