Racing in March, April, or May? Your training year has already started — here’s how to use it.
If you have a marathon on the calendar for March, April, or May next year, it can feel like a lifetime away. The mistake many runners make is starting their training too late. They only get serious about their preparation when they should be hitting their peak mileage and key marathon workouts. The ramp up can be too quick, too soon and lead to overuse injury or too much fatigue.
The problem with “I’ll start when the plan starts”
Most marathon plans are 16 to 20 weeks long. So the logic goes: my race is in April, sixteen weeks back is January, I’ll start in January.
The plan isn’t wrong. What’s wrong is the assumption that nothing important happens before week one.
A 16-week plan is written on the assumption that you arrive at week one already able to absorb it. It assumes you have a running base. It also assumes your tendons and bones have seen consistent load, and that you can run fast enough for the paces in the plan. If you show up on 1 January off eight weeks of hardly any training, you run the risk of stressing the body too much.
The athletes who have great spring marathons are, almost without exception, the athletes who were already running in October.
What consistency actually buys you
Here’s the thing about your body: not all of it adapts at the same speed.
Your cardiovascular system adapts quickly to training. Plasma volume, mitochondrial density, capillary networks — these respond within weeks. It’s why running fitness feels like it comes back quickly, and why a few weeks of good training can convince you you’re on track.
Your connective tissue takes much longer to adapt to running training. Tendons, ligaments, and bone remodel over months, not weeks. That mismatch is the single most common way a marathon build goes wrong: your engine gets ahead of your chassis, you feel great, you run more than your structure has earned, and in week eleven your achilles tendon registers a formal complaint.
You cannot rush that timeline. What you can do is start it early. Every consistent week you put in between now and January is a week your tendons and bones are quietly getting stronger. Consistency can be boring, but it can also be the difference between a spring PB and a spring MRI.
Consistency is a physiological requirement with a long lead time.
Periodization, simplified
Periodization sounds like something that requires a spreadsheet and a sports science degree. It doesn’t. It’s one idea: you can’t work on everything at once, so you work on different things at different times, in an order that makes sense.
Broadly, a well-built year has a general preparation phase and a specific preparation phase. General prep is where you build the athlete — the engine, the tissue tolerance, the strength, the movement quality, the raw speed. Specific prep is where you take that athlete and point them at one particular race, with all its particular demands.
Here’s what people get backwards. They spend the general phase doing nothing, then try to cram general and specific work into the same sixteen weeks. It doesn’t fit. Specific marathon training is demanding enough on its own with long runs, the marathon-pace work, and the required weekly volume.
Right now, in September, you are in the general phase. Use it on the things you won’t have time for later.
The four things to work on right now
1. Speed — yes, now, when the race is furthest away
This is the one that surprises people. Your race is a marathon, so surely marathon pace is the priority?
Later, absolutely. Right now, short, fast work — strides, hill sprints, 200s and 400s with generous recovery — is doing something marathon-pace running can’t. It’s recruiting high-threshold motor units, improving neuromuscular coordination, and raising your ceiling. And a higher ceiling makes marathon pace feel easier by making it a smaller fraction of what you’re capable of.
2. Strength, in the actual weight room
Not a resistance band on the lounge floor. A barbell, or something like it, loaded properly.
Heavy, low-rep strength work and plyometrics are among the best-evidenced interventions we have for distance runners, and they do two things at once: they improve running economy — you use less oxygen at the same pace — and they meaningfully reduce injury risk.
But strength adaptations take time. You need time to develop good technique before adding a lot of weight to the barbell. Once technique is mastered you need a couple of months of consistent lifting before the good stuff shows up, and you need to be lifting heavy enough to stimulate it — which means being far enough from your race that a bit of leg soreness doesn’t wreck a key session. Now is a great time to develop strength in the weight room.
3. Running form
Form work is one of the few things that genuinely needs low-pressure time to change, and it never gets it, because nobody wants to be thinking about cadence and posture in the middle of a goal-pace session.
Now is when you can afford to be a bit awkward. Drills, strides with a cue you’re actually holding in mind, some honest video from the side, addressing the mobility restriction that’s been quietly shaping how you move for three years. Changes to motor patterns take repetition over weeks and months, and they need to be automatic well before you’re deep in fatigue on race day.
4. General fitness and conditioning
Being fit year round always pays dividends in the long run. General principles of conditioning include aerobic volume you can genuinely handle week in and week out, adequate sleep, and good nutrition that covers what you’re doing.
The goal for this phase isn’t to be race-fit. It’s to arrive at January as a more robust, better-built athlete than you are today — someone who can absorb a real marathon block instead of merely surviving one.
Then, and only then, the specific work
When your race is 12 to 16 weeks out, everything narrows. Long runs get longer and more purposeful. Marathon-pace work becomes the focus. Sessions start to mimic the actual demands of your actual course — its hills, its heat, its wind, the specific way it will ask you to hurt at 32km. Fueling gets rehearsed rather than improvised. Strength drops to maintenance.
That phase works brilliantly, but only if there’s an athlete underneath it ready to be sharpened. Specific training doesn’t build the athlete. It focuses one. The building happens now.
If Cape Town is your spring marathon
23 May 2027 is the Sanlam Cape Town Marathon’s first edition as an Abbott World Marathon Major — the eighth Major, and Africa’s first. Cape Town is where I did my PhD and where some of my closest friends still are, and I care about this race, the city, and the running community there.
We’ve built a coaching service specifically for it. Personalized training for the demands of that course, that climate, and that travel — built around your life, not a template. And I’ll be in Cape Town on race weekend, in person, with our athletes on the ground.
If that’s your race, or if your spring marathon is somewhere else entirely and you’d rather not spend January discovering what you should have been doing in October — get in touch. The best time to start is now.