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Long-Journey Races, Such as the Marathon and Others

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TRAINING FOR A LONG-JOURNEY RACE.

The principal item is walking. Get out for a sixteen-mile walk walk three or four times a week, and walk at a good steady four-and-a-half-miles-an-hour pace. On the other days go eight miles only at about five miles an hour, saving one day for a sixteen-mile steady road run.
Keep this up for a month or six weeks, and then go harder for the last month. Lengthen your run to twenty miles or even twenty-five miles, and do this either twice n week, or three times in a fortnight. Do all the running practice on the road, so as to harden your muscles. Lengthen out the walks also during these last four or five weeks, making them twenty or twenty-five miles twice a week, and twelve to fifteen miles on the other days. Pace won’t matter so much, so you can leave all sprinting practice severely alone.
It is the distance and not the pace that in going to kill in a long-journey race.
When the contest itself comes off get away at a long, slow, steady stride-one that you can keep up indefinitely. Don’t. lift your feet too high or try and tire yourself in any way. The best action, not the prettiest, is the one to cultivate, and every care must be taken to avoid jar-ring the muscles.
Let your arms hang down and loose, and bend forward just enough to help you along. Run as near as possible
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as you could imagine yourself running in your sleep, without exertion and without fatigue.
Don’t worry to any extent about your relative position. You will, or should, have so habituated yourself as to be able to cover the distance in inside the records (which, As I have said, are far from being wonderful), and can rest content that if you are, as you should feel yourself to be, covering the road or track at the proper pace, the other men who have gone ahead must inevitably come back to you.
Don’t listen to the spectators but just keep going. If you entertain any doubts as to your progress get a few friends to poet themselves along the route to give you your time. You can then quicken up if need be, but really there should be no necessity for this, as you should run by instinct, and, as I have suggested, more or less mechanically.
Long-journey races, can hardly be called exciting affairs. There is hardly, if ever, anything of a finish, the winner, as a rule, coming in alone; and if you care to follow out these rules and are physically constituted for the effort, there should be no doubt as to that winner being yourself.

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