How Much MP work should I be doing each week?
How much Marathon Pace work should you be doing per week?
Many of you know about the 80/20 rule with training- that’s 80% easy and 20% hard. Now, what qualifies as hard work is up for debate, but that’s for another time. What I want to do is break down what specific sources of work you are looking to do and how much during the week you should be doing.
Today, let’s talk marathon pace work:
Typically, marathon pace work can be 15-20% of your weekly volume, with a max of 18 miles. Meaning at
- 30-40 miles per week, you can get up to about 4-8 miles worth of work.
- 40-50 mpw- 6-10 miles per week
- 50-60 mpw- 7-12 miles per week
You wouldn’t get to that 18 mile max until you were putting in about 90 miles per week. For most of my athletes, they can get near max benefit if they can be in the 50 mile per week range, and peak around 60.
It gets tricky on less weekly volume because it usually means that the person is running slower times and there often becomes a skewing of what might be possible to run versus, what their training allows. In other words, their overall endurance probably isn’t that great, and will average a slower pace on race day than what they averaged in training.
Further evidence for me, is that if we can boost your weekly training volume to 40-50 miles per week and sustain that, we can drop a lot of over 4 hour marathoners times significantly! Take your time, focus on easy volume, and use these figures as guidelines. Follow me for more training insight!
