Falling short of marathon goal?

lporter229

Just curious. If you have a marathon goal in mind and you come up short, how soon to you try again? Do you ride the wave of the training you already put in or do you give yourself a good recovery and start over again?

SonicDeathMonkey80

For me, I chose to wait a year, and it's showtime again this September.

Carrieendar

I DNFed my last marathon- with like 3 miles to go I might add!! heartbreak!. I took a couple weeks to get over it (wherein I read a lot about running, decided to change up my diet and get leaner, decided to do some runs without all the 'tech' and just get back to enjoying it). Then I took 2 months about to train for a shorter distance (10k) and I am going to tackle the marathon again in the fall. I am running BOston in the spring and I couldn't let my last marathon before it be a DNF...plus, after putting in the time so far this summer on the shorter stuff and making the siet changes, I am soooo much faster. It all has me really pumped up to get training long again!

JTick

I'm not a marathon-er yet, so take this with a grain of salt, but I would imagine a lot would have to do with WHY you are coming short. Mental? Physical? Injured?

NorthCountryDreamer

I believe that peak marathon racing is something that you can do two or three times per year. It takes a toll. If I don't BQ in the fall then a June marathon is just fine. I would say a new 20 week cycle is in order. If you don't care about time then you can run marathons every other weekend or every month and it won't matter.

vmclach

Hmm. I almost always fall short of my A goal. Usually, if it's within 10 min of my goal I'm like "meh whatever.. Good enough".. However, I've i "blow up" and totally don't even come close to the goal.. Ei my first full.. I wanted 3:40 ran 4:09... So 7 weeks later I just tried at it again hit 3:47. I've missed almost all my goals. My last being 3:20 ran a 3:27. I was still content
Depends On how "destroyed" you are.

lporter229

I believe that peak marathon racing is something that you can do two or three times per year. It takes a toll. If I don't BQ in the fall then a June marathon is just fine. I would say a new 20 week cycle is in order. If you don't care about time then you can run marathons every other weekend or every month and it won't matter.

I completely agree with this. I started the year training for a May marathon, but ended up having to drop out of training due to illness and spent several months this year doing little or no running. I am just now getting back into the swing of things, and by that I mean averaging 20-25 MPW. My first full marathon was about finishing, but this time around I really want to know what I can do if I give it my all. I was contemplating a November marathon, but I am really not sure that gives me enough time to get back to where I want to be. So then I started looking at January. But I am also wondering if maybe I should shoot for the November marathon and if I come up short, there's always January. Or is this too soon? I am concerned that the next marathon I run may be my last, so I want to make it a good one.

DavidMartinez2

Depending how hard you push yourself you can come back quickly. A few months ago a friend of mine missed BQ at San Louis Obispo by 2 minutes; it was still a big PR for him but he was disappointed. Rather than reset and go through another full training cycle he went to the OC marathon a week later and got his BQ.

Not everyone is going to be able to bounce back like that and OC is a much more forgiving course than SLO but I don't think any of us here are putting our bodies through the kind of abuse elite marathoners do so a quick turnaround can be done.