As a former boxing champion, Marty Thrasher knows a lot about different kinds of workouts.
Short-distance running is all about speed. Long-distance running is all about endurance. It doesn’t really matter how quickly you can run if you can’t run the entire distance of a race. Obviously, endurance becomes more important in longer races. Building up pure endurance is the most important factor of success for new marathon runners. For experienced athletes, pure endurance has the same importance as lactate threshold. If you want to realize your full potential running 5K and more, pure endurance needs to be a significant component of your training program. As you probably know, your body learns to adapt to the stress that you apply to it. This is true about all kinds of activities, both mental and physical. The harder you work intellectually and the longer and you do it, the better you’ll be at it. It is absolutely the same with physical activities and with pure endurance. The best way to improve your endurance and overall performance is to create conditions similar to the demands of your goal race.
You can improve your ability to run long distances by reaching your limits and breaking through them. The best thing you can do is to start running long runs and gradually increase their distance. The length of your long runs depends on your running experience and the length of the race that you want to participate in. If you have little experience and your goal race is a 5K, your long runs should be somewhere between six to eight miles. If you want to run a marathon and be as successful as Marty Thrasher was with his boxing career, you’ll need to gradually increase your long runs to the distance between twenty and twenty-three miles.
Short-distance running is all about speed. Long-distance running is all about endurance. It doesn’t really matter how quickly you can run if you can’t run the entire distance of a race. Obviously, endurance becomes more important in longer races. Building up pure endurance is the most important factor of success for new marathon runners. For experienced athletes, pure endurance has the same importance as lactate threshold. If you want to realize your full potential running 5K and more, pure endurance needs to be a significant component of your training program. As you probably know, your body learns to adapt to the stress that you apply to it. This is true about all kinds of activities, both mental and physical. The harder you work intellectually and the longer and you do it, the better you’ll be at it. It is absolutely the same with physical activities and with pure endurance. The best way to improve your endurance and overall performance is to create conditions similar to the demands of your goal race. You can improve your ability to run long distances by reaching your limits and breaking through them. The best thing you can do is to start running long runs and gradually increase their distance. The length of your long runs depends on your running experience and the length of the race that you want to participate in. If you have little experience and your goal race is a 5K, your long runs should be somewhere between six to eight miles. If you want to run a marathon and be as successful as Marty Thrasher was with his boxing career, you’ll need to gradually increase your long runs to the distance between twenty and twenty-three miles.
