First Half Marathon How long does it take to train for a half marathon?

Why it takes weeks, not willpower

In the late 1950s, a New Zealand coach named Arthur Lydiard took a young 800-meter runner, a two-lap specialist named Peter Snell, and trained him like a marathoner. "One hundred miles a week was standard," Athletics Weekly recalled. In 1960, Snell won Olympic gold in Rome. "Developing endurance is difficult and time consuming," he said later.

You won't be running 100 miles a week (thankfully). But the lesson is the same for a first half: endurance takes time to build, and no amount of willpower speeds it up.

Your heart and lungs catch on fast. Within a few weeks, your body gets better at turning food and oxygen into energy, and by about week 8, your easy runs start to feel easier, with a lower heart rate at the same pace. That's the part you notice, and it's a great day when it arrives.

Your legs take longer. Tendons toughen up over a couple of months, and bone takes 3 to 4 months to fully rebuild. Bone needs fuel to rebuild, too: running a lot on too little food is a common road to a stress fracture. So patience comes in two parts. Add miles slowly, and eat enough to cover them.

Both are hard to do in a hurry. Lots of running injuries start with one run that's much longer than anything you've done in the past month. Squeeze your training into too few weeks and that big jump gets hard to avoid.

Is 8 weeks enough for a first half?

Hal Higdon, whose Novice 1 plan is in the list above, once had a charity marathon on his calendar and a bout of bronchitis in the way. People had pledged money, plenty of them were watching, and he didn't feel he could pull out. "I ran a marathon too soon after a bout of bronchitis, and it morphed into pneumonia," he wrote later. "But I was wrong, and running that marathon was a very bad choice."

That's the hidden value of giving yourself more weeks. It isn't only time to build. It's room to absorb the cold you catch in week 5, the trip that eats a long run, and the ache that needs a few days off, and still reach the start line healthy. You never have to choose between your race date and your body.

Eight weeks leaves almost none of that room. If you're starting near zero, it probably isn't enough, and I don't make an 8-week first-half plan for that reason: your long run needs time to grow from 4 miles to 10 without any scary jumps. If your race is 8 weeks out and you're new, you've got two good options. Run-walk it and enjoy the finish, or pick a later race and enjoy getting there.

What a training week looks like: runs, strength, and food

Will Ferrell's first marathon, New York in 2001, took him 5 hours and 1 minute. His second, in Stockholm the next summer, took 4:28. His third, Boston in 2003, took 3:56, an hour faster than his first. No single heroic workout did that. A lot of ordinary weeks did.

The running part of a first-half week is simpler than most people expect. Three or four runs, nearly all of them easy, slow enough that you could chat with a friend the whole way. One of them, usually Saturday, is the long run, and that's the one that gets you ready. A short strength session fits in between, because strength work does more to prevent injuries than stretching does. And three days of running a week is plenty. When sports doctor Brett Toresdahl studied New York City Marathon runners, "We saw a lot of people had successful training programs where they were running 3 days a week," he told WABC-TV.

Your food shouldn't be the same every day, either. A 10-mile long run burns roughly 1,000 calories for a 150-pound runner, and a rest day burns almost nothing extra. Eat the same every day and you'll be running on empty Saturday. Eating enough to match your training is what lets the training work: more carbs around your long run and harder days, and normal meals on rest days. Runners need more carbs and protein than people who don't train, and protein is best spread across your meals for repair.

Des Linden, who won the 2018 Boston Marathon, summed up her whole career in one line: "The whole thing was keep showing up and that's what I started in 2007." The weeks are where you practice showing up, for your runs and for your meals.

The long run is a dress rehearsal

Meb Keflezighi won an Olympic silver medal and the Boston Marathon, but he started out as a miler. His longest runs were 6 or 7 miles when someone in San Diego planned a 10-mile Sunday loop and he went along. "I was like, 'I don't know if I can make it,'" he told Men's Fitness. They ended up running 12. "I felt ecstatic afterwards," he said. "I didn't think I could do it, but that's the beauty of it: One mile at a time and eventually you do it."

Twelve miles is about where a first-half long run tops out, and you'll get there the same way: one mile at a time, from a first long run of 4. You'll run 13.1 for the first time on race day, and that's by design. Saturday's run builds endurance, and it's also your rehearsal for race day. Wear the shoes you'll race in. Try the shorts and the socks. Find out what rubs at mile 8, so you don't find out at mile 11 of the real thing.

Saturday is your biggest eating day, too. Once long runs pass 90 minutes, practice with a gel so race day holds no surprises. Afterward, a meal with carbs and protein within a couple of hours starts the repair. Don't save calories for later: the rest of the day is when the long run turns into fitness.

Can you lose weight training for a half?

Mary Kennedy, an exercise physiologist, coached a charity team of marathon runners in 2009 and kept hearing the same question about weight. So she weighed all 64 of them before and after their training. After three months of running four days a week, 78 percent weighed almost exactly the same. About 11 percent lost weight, and just as many gained. "This idea that you're going to run a marathon and the pounds are going to melt away is not realistic," she said.

Running doesn't take the weight off. A calorie deficit does: the size of the deficit drives fat loss, whatever you do to create it. Training raises what you burn, and it raises your appetite with it. "I'm ravenous after a long run," Kennedy said. Run a lot and eat more than you burn, or eat the wrong things, and the scale won't move.

So yes, you can lose weight training for a half, as long as your food is part of the plan. A few things help. Lose slowly: about half a percent to one percent of your weight a week, a pound or so for most people, keeps more of your muscle, and crash diets raise the odds of getting sick or hurt. Eat plenty of protein and keep your strength sessions, so the weight you lose is fat, not muscle. And don't skimp on carbs around your long run, because that's the run your whole plan is built around.

Take the deficit from your everyday eating, not your training days. The runner who skips breakfast before Saturday's long run to lose weight faster usually gets a miserable long run and a ravenous Sunday.

How you’ll know it’s working

Eliud Kipchoge, the two-time Olympic marathon champion, keeps his training in paper notebooks. "Since he began to take the sport seriously, he has recorded every workout in a notebook," the New York Times wrote in 2018. "He has 15 notebooks now, one for every year he has spent on the world stage." He once wrote down a formula, too: "Motivation + Discipline = Consistency."

You don't need a notebook, but you'll want the record. It turns "I think I'm getting fitter" into something you can see. Around week 8, pull up an easy run from week 1 and compare. Same pace, lower heart rate? That's your fitness showing up. It's a great pick-me-up in the middle weeks, when race day still feels far away, and an Apple Watch is accurate enough to show it.

Your body keeps its own record. Always tired, legs never fresh, catching every cold, sleeping badly, paces stalled: those can all be signs you're eating too little for your training, so check your food first.

The record also catches trouble before it turns into an injury: a long run that jumps too far, a week where you ran more and ate less, a pair of shoes quietly piling up miles. Those are easy to miss when your runs live in one app, your food in another, and your plan on the fridge.

Race day

Boston, April 2018: cold rain, wind, and Des Linden freezing near the front. "Early on, I was freezing and my muscles were tight, and I was like 'This isn't – this is not my day,'" she told NPR. She planned to drop out. When Shalane Flanagan stopped for a bathroom break, Linden waited and helped pull her back to the group, figuring she might as well be useful before she quit. Then she just kept going: "Just show up for one more mile. Show up for one more minute." She won, the first American woman to win Boston since 1985.

You won't be racing for the win. But somewhere past mile 10 you'll want her mantra. One more mile is always a size you can manage.

Before then, the last stretch of your plan gets lighter on purpose, because running less in the final weeks, while keeping a little speed, helps you race better. Keep eating normally through those lighter weeks. Your body is busy finishing the job. On the morning, start slower than you want to, and save the brave miles for the end.

"Running a marathon is not a question of whether it will be painful, but when it will be painful," Ferrell said before Boston. The half is kinder, and patient training pushes "when" deep into the race.

John "The Penguin" Bingham, who came to running in middle age and became the voice of the back of the pack, put the whole thing best in The Courage to Start: "The miracle isn't that I finished. The miracle is that I had the courage to start."

You've already done the hard part. You signed up.