Aiming to run a spring marathon? Whether you’re aiming to run your first marathon or your best marathon yet, now is the time to start working towards your finish line. Many runners make the mistake of putting their spring marathon training off until after Christmas, but if you can start laying the foundations this autumn, you’ll have a head start in January.

Marathon training takes patience and consistency. You may spend a lot of your training wondering how on earth you’re going to complete 26.2 miles (or 42k) on race day. But don’t worry, if you’re ticking off your training runs, the race will take care of itself.

It’s natural to worry that you won’t be able to complete your race, or won’t be able to complete it at your goal pace. Every runner experiences this – it’s part of challenging yourself that you will question whether you’ve bitten off more than you can chew. Remember that your training is there to help you reach your goal and you only need to be ready on race day, not a moment sooner.

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When to start training for a spring marathon

The sooner you start preparing the better, so don’t fall into the trap of putting it off until January. This doesn’t mean that you have to start your marathon training plan right away – your progressive plan should start 16-20 weeks before your race – but you should be out running regularly between now and then.

Setting a regular routine of running and strength training each week, even for just a few miles at a time, will make it easier to start your plan when the time comes. The period of running before your training starts is often referred to as base training. It’s the training you do to get your body (and mind) ready for the actual training. You can choose one of our marathon base training plans.

Allowing for Christmas and New Year

While training for an autumn marathon means having to navigate the summer holidays and the potential disruptions that can bring, runners training for a spring marathon have Christmas and New Year to contend with. Talk to your family and friends about how much training you’re planning to do around Christmas and plan ahead as much as possible.

One way to avoid this having too much of an impact on your training is to start your training a week or two earlier. That way you can give yourself a buffer if training doesn’t go so well in December. Then if you do manage to tick off all the runs on your plan without hiccup, just repeat a week.

Winter training for a spring marathon

Training for a spring marathon means training through the winter and the bad weather that this brings. While you will escape the heat of the summer that training for an autumn marathon involves, you will be faced with the opposite problem: freezing temperatures, rain and possibly snow.

A good running jacket can help, along with other key winter running kit such as a base layer and some reflective kit for darker runs. But if you really don’t fancy heading out into the cold, you can do your miles on a treadmill.

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Build up races for a spring marathon

If you’re building up to a marathon in April or May, you’ll find plenty of shorter races in February and March that you can incorporate into your training. Training races are a good way to practice the logistics of race day such as getting to the start as well as testing your and practicing pacing yourself around other runners.

• Five of the best spring half marathons
• The best 20 mile races in the UK

Remember not to get carried away in training races and to run them at a fairly comfortable pace.

Focus on your easy paced running

Marathon training should focus heavily on aerobic, easy-paced running. A marathon is a long way and you’re going to be using your aerobic energy system to get you round the course. To reap all the benefits of your training miles you need to slow your pace right down. This is good news for spring marathon runners as it can be difficult to motivate yourself to run fast in bad weather.

Running truly easy encourages more mitochondria to develop in your cells, and promotes bigger mitochondria. This is a very important adaptation as mitochondria are where the energy in fat and glycogen (carbs) gets turned into something your body can use to run (ATP). It also encourages greater capillary density, meaning oxygen can get to the cells of your exercising muscles more readily. It helps improve your VO2 max (how much oxygen your body can transport and use while running), and develops a better running economy (how fast you can run at a set amount of oxygen).

Just know that however slow you feel on your runs, they’re making a difference and helping you towards that finish line.

Need a training plan? We’ve got marathon plans for every runner.