Many people set the goal to start running to run a marathon. Today’s question comes from Polokwane and Janet wanted to know realistically how long after you first start running can you expect to run your first marathon?

Brad Brown: Many people set the goal to start running to run a marathon. Today’s question comes from Polokwane and Janet wanted to know realistically how long after you first start running can you expect to run your first marathon?

Couch potato to your first marathon

That depends on how long you were completely inactive, so let’s go with worst case scenario of 5 – 10 years of complete inactivity and now you want to run your first marathon. In that scenario, you could probably go there pretty safely without too many concerns of injury in about 6 months.

In that case you’ll be spending the first 3 months building up very slowly from more walking than running to almost running the whole way for 30 – 40 minutes over a 12 week period. You can then build up over the next 12, maybe 16 weeks from that point where you can run interrupted for 40 minutes to finish a marathon.

If we take someone who is a runner and maybe only does  10km’s and maybe the odd 21km, but not necessarily, we could probably go from there to their first marathon in 12 – 20 weeks for them.

It would just depend on the individual, but most people can probably get to the point of finishing a marathon in 12 weeks.