Francesco Schwarz

In April 2021 I will run the Hamburg marathon. It will be my second marathon after the Munich marathon in October 2018, which I ran in a net time of 3 hours and 44 minutes. My goal for 2021 is a net time of 3 hours and 30 minutes, which means I will run an average pace of just under five minutes per kilometer.

So, it’s roughly 36 weeks until the marathon. I’ve been going over my running schedule in my head. According to Herbert Steffny (his website is pretty dope, check it out, I will wait here for you) in order to run a marathon in 3 hours and 30 minutes one should be able to run a distance of 10 kilometers in 45 minutes and a half-marathon in 1 hour and 40 minutes. To bridge the time until the marathon training I thought it would be a good idea to train for and run both the 10k and the 21k distance in the mentioned duration.

This is my schedule:

1. In order to get my body accustomed to an increased running workload I will gradually increase the weekly mileage of my current runs until the start of the 10k training (that’s in ten weeks) to about 50k per week.
2. The 10k training starts October 26th and spans over a period of six weeks. On December 6th I will run the 10k in 45 minutes.
3. After a break of two weeks, the half-marathon training begins on December 21st and spans over a period of six weeks. I will run the half-marathon on January 31st in 1 hour and 40 minutes.
4. After a break of two weeks, the marathon training begins on February 15th and spans over a period of ten weeks. I will run the marathon on April 25th in 3 hours and 30 minutes (that is still to be seen, though 😀).