Last year, 31 London Frontrunners completed the London Marathon. With organised runs five days a week, London Frontrunners is the perfect place to train for your next spring marathon (and we’ll support you all the way).
In preparation for the next spring marathon season, our head coach, Matt, has created a flexible training plan for all runners; beginners to seasoned marathoners. The free, 16-week marathon training plan is available to download at the bottom of the page, with four to six runs per week to set you up for success.
Tips and tricks to the training plan
Easy runs: Around 80% of marathon training is the ‘easy run’; a comfortably paced run that can be sustained throughout the whole session. Not every run is a race, imagine running the easy run at about 60% of your maximum capacity. Easy runs are designed to add mileage to increase endurance, but allow your body to recover between the more intense training sessions or long runs. With four runs a week, alternate between the easy run and a more intense session to avoid injury and fatigue.
Long runs: A weekend long run is a staple of a marathon training plan. It adds those kms to slowly build you up to reaching the full distance of the marathon. At the peak of training, you’ll run around 70-80% of the marathon distance in the long run. Our long run schedule at London Frontrunners will start to build up those distances from January, and with dedicated paced groups from 5 min/km to 6 min/km, we will keep you on target during this tough run.
Track and club workouts: On Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, London Frontrunners has dedicated coaching sessions for our members. Led by England Athletics trained coaches, the sessions will push you to improve your speed and form, and stimulate those fast-twitch muscle fibres for race-day brilliance. Our Wednesday coaching sessions are particularly targeted to beginners, where anyone of any ability can take part in the session. Throughout the spring, our track sessions will also have dedicated goal assessments to help monitor your progress. Check out our monthly training plan for more information.
Tempo runs: For more experienced runners, adding in a weekly tempo run helps to push you to your race PB. On a tempo run, you should aim to sustain a harder pace around 80-90% of your maximum capacity, or think about a pace just a bit faster than your marathon pace goals. Including tempo runs into your routine can also help you understand how to pace the easy run better (see above), where it is quite easy to go too fast too often. Many race pace calculators are available to help work out what a good tempo pace would be for your marathon goal time.
Week-by-week
The London Frontrunners marathon plan is extremely flexible to your schedule, allowing you to tick off each run each week with the tick boxes assigned to the session.
But, if you’re looking for the group motivation (and we hope you are), we have set out how the runs can be placed into our weekly run schedule for each level of runner. Examples of how to structure the weeks based on our weekly runs are:
Beginner
Monday (easy), Wednesday (coaching), Thursday (easy), Saturday (long run).
Intermediate
Monday (easy), Wednesday (tempo), Thursday (track), Saturday (long run), Sunday (easy)
OR
Monday (easy), Wednesday (coaching), Thursday (tempo), Saturday (long run), Sunday (easy)
Advanced
Monday (easy), Tuesday (track), Wednesday (easy), Thursday (tempo), Saturday (long run), Sunday (easy).
OR
Monday (easy), Tuesday (tempo), Wednesday (easy), Thursday (track), Saturday (long run), Sunday (easy)
Join London Frontrunners for your marathon training
Whether you are running for charity, for yourself or accidentally succeeded in the London Marathon ballot, we would love for you to join frontrunners for your marathon training. Check out our FAQs if you’re interested in coming along, or simply come to one of our weekly runs and speak to our run leads.