Marathon Season Review 2024

Firstly, a massive well done to all those who are part of the community who have raced a marathon in the last 12 months and it has been our most successful set of results we have had since the clinic opened so a big thanks to you all!

The reason for the post is to share what we believe has played an important role in this continual development of performance and hopefully can take some of the learnings from it.

2023 if people can remember was our best set  of marathon results and we set out some of the characteristics which we believed played an important part and was common on the guys that ran well which included a set number of week’s build up, the number of long runs over 20 miles and the amount of strength and conditioning session completed in the training block to mention a few of the things we listed last year.

From a coaching perspective I am always looking to improve and with a saturated market place of available online coaches my athletes running personal best times is how I can measure continual improvement and keep me relevant. Previously my running personal best times from long ago may have helped me standout from other coaches but a recent comparison on an age grading score website showed that my half marathon personal best of 63.11mins at the age of 29 years old back then gave me an age graded score of 97.2% but if we compare that to current world best times my time back then has now dropped my down to 92.1% so it shows just how much times have improved for several reasons since the time I was running at my peak!

Age-Grading is a way of measuring your athletics performance taking into account your age and sex. It enables you to produce a percentage score for each run or other athletics event based on how old you were when you did the competition and the comparative performance of world record holders taking into their age and event itself.

So, at the end of last year and before going into the 2024 marathon block of training I took things right back to basics to try and look at how the following year’s set of numbers could be slightly tweaked to get better results.

I only ever had two running coaches but the overall message they both gave me was that running is a simple sport and not to make it too complicated.

The first thing I did was re-read two books that I believe helped as I wanted to get a general feel of things. These were “More than Winning” by Alastair Aiken and the other was “British Marathon Runners of the 80’s” by Gabrielle Collison. Both books in a nutshell are a fascinating collection of athlete’s thoughts, philosophy and practice advice collected from interviews.

Having re-read these I also used my own marathon experience and training the slight tweaks were to try and simplify the training just a little bit more for the next block.I added a little more volume into their marathon preparations compared to previously as the invention of super shoes really have helped with an athlete's ability to resist fatigue.

There were less complicated sessions added in this block but the general overall base running pace was increased only very slightly but kept within their test result zones to ensure overtraining was not happening.

A bigger focus right up until the week before race day on continual strength and conditioning was practiced to ensure each athlete was strong come race day. Finally race results in the lead up to the marathon performance were important but not critical to end results as the whole process was more important than a single race result.

These may not seem ground breaking tweaks because they aren’t but small enough changes to result in our best set of marathon performances from Seville back in February right up to and including all the marathons in 2024 until Valencia last weekend.

Well done everyone who helped form these stats and now onto 2025 and how to improve again!