Keeping your head in the last 8km of a marathon

Keeping your head in the last 8km of a marathon

Everyone struggles through the end of a marathon. It comes with the package. But there are ways to try make sure you get through what is a tough ending. On this episode of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Lindsey tells you how to mentally and physically prepare for this passage.

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Transcript

Welcome back to yet another edition of the Ask Coach Parry podcast, Lindsey Parry with us once again, I’m Brad Brown and Lindsey, great question in off the Facebook group from Willoughby Britz. Willoughby was asking, how do you keep your head in the last 8km of a marathon, it’s something that people, everyone struggles with. A couple of comments on there saying that that’s the longest 8km you’ll ever run in your life, but it is a tough part of the marathon, how do you get through that?

Nothing harder physically and mentally

Lindsey Parry: It’s what makes marathon racing what it is. It’s very different going and jogging an 8km, but in my opinion, there is nothing harder, physically and mentally than racing a 42.2km distance. It’s short enough that you can throw the kitchen sink at it, but it’s long enough that that takes an immense amount of concentration. Regardless of who you are, you are going to be in a lot of pain in those last 8km and it is, it’s a question of mind over matter.

In international races and races with great crowd support, we generally tend to hang tougher than if you’re out in the middle of nowhere running a marathon. So, really all you can do is to prepare yourself for that moment, know that it’s coming. Shore yourself up for it, use a lot of self-talk.

How to train for the final 8km of a marathon

In your training, you would use sessions, something like what we call a ‘fast finish’. So you may do a training run that’s an hour to an hour and a half of easy running and then 30 minutes run at your marathon or a bit quicker than your marathon pace. That session is all about keeping your body going under pressure.

It’s not exactly the same as running a race, no, but at least it gives you that feeling of the body tiredness that you’re going to experience towards the end of the marathon. But on race day, it’s about guts, it’s about how badly you want it, it’s about using the right self-talk. It’s about focusing on holding your form together.

You can get quite tense and bunch your shoulders and bunch your neck up with the effort of trying to keep that pace even though you’re feeling quite bad. If you can actually force your shoulders to relax and keep your running relaxed, that’s going to go a long way to helping you at least feel a bit better in those last 8km.

BB: Awesome stuff, Willoughby, best of luck. As Lindsey says, it’s a very mental thing and the more you hang out in those spaces, the easier it becomes – not that it ever does become easy. But you do learn to manage it, so good luck with that too.

Don’t forget, you can be in touch, just head over to coachparry.com and check out the online community. We’ve got a great annual option, it’ll save you more than 25%, all you need to do is head over to askcoachparry.com/join. Until next time, from the two of us, it’s cheers.

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