How long between marathons ?

How long would anyone recommend between marathons ? I was hoping to get into the edinburgh marathon but didn't get a place in the ballot and couldn't raise the minimum sponsorship for a charity place (£500), so i applied for the Lochaber marathon and got a place. However a charity has just contacted me wondering if i wanted to do the edinburgh for them and said i would only need to raise £150 minimum (what the charity paid for the place) but obviously i would try to raise more. Lochaber is 27th April and Edinburgh is 15th June so thats 7 weeks between them, any opinions? Myself i think thats to close together and i think i may have read somewhere that your body takes about a month to recover. Also this is my first proper marathon, i did a cross country thing 3 years ago. For the past year i have been running regularly 2 or 3 times a week, usually 3 or 4 mile runs. Since New Year i have started a proper training programme for the Lochaber marathon.

Comments

  • if you had done a few marathons i would say it sounds fine, but if your body hasn't been doing marathon type training for all that long, be careful....
    a compromise would be to take the first marathon very easy...run it, don't race it if you see what i mean, and then be very very nice to yourself in between, and have a go at the second one....
    and be prepared to have a hard time and possibly walk some of it....but there's no shame in that!
  • There was another thread around on this not long ago Ill try to find it and boing it back to the top
  • Thanks jim the plum, i found the other thread. Think i'll just go for the Lochaber marathon as i was really wanting to do a decent time. From all the posts it sounds like it would be possible to do the two but i'd need to take the first one really easy and not go for a good time then i'd probably not be fully recovered by the second one to really go for that and get a good time. I did a 26 mile cross country walk 3 years ago (Goyt Valley Challenge, in Buxton, Peak District) but some people ran it, including me, however there were a lot of boggy bits to cross, up hill bits and it snowed/rained all the way round (in April !). I completed it in 5 hours 19 minutes. Since then i've always been tempted to do a normal flat road marathon just to see what time i would do, i would like to aim for under 4 hours 30 minutes, so think i'll just stick to doing the one. Thanks for all the posts and info.
  • I am doing London, then on the 11 May I am doing Leeds, don't know if I should really but after my last marathon I was running again within 2 days and felt fine, I am not going for a fast time for Leeds
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