![]() ![]() The whole point about CFE is that it gives you structural balance.’ To maintain good posture you need a strong back, fluid arm movement, and a firm core. If you don’t have strong neck muscles you won’t be able to support that and this will have a knock-on effect on the rest of the body. ‘When you run, you need your whole body to be strong – you’re carrying your head at high speed, and your head weighs up to around five kilograms. Where you feel pain is in your muscles they’re cramping and fatigue. Marathons aren’t run quickly enough for you to be struggling to breathe. What hurts when you finish a marathon? Your lungs or your legs? If you’ve been running for two years or more, your aerobic system is fine. Schouten develops his point: ‘Secondly, running is a whole-body exercise and yet most people only train their legs. There’s some logic there but, like many marathoners, I’ve been well acquainted with the faster-paced world of speedwork and tempo runs for some time. This requires training other than running.’ You need to develop explosive power and go faster over short distances before you can learn to go faster over longer distances. Firstly, if you only train long and slow, you’ll end up going long and slow. But, actually, there are two arguments to counter that. ‘Runners and cyclists always think the answer is more of what they know. ‘That’s a typical endurance-monkey’s viewpoint,’ says Schouten, an Australian who has been leading the CrossFit charge in the UK. I mean, rule number one in the runner’s handbook is that if you want to become a better runner you have to do more running, right? I could see how spending time in the gym would achieve the first goal, but numbers two and three just didn’t seem logical to me. I was prepared to cut back my beloved pavement (and occasional trail) pounding and commit myself to the evil-sounding CrossFit regime if it could deliver the following three results:Ģ/ A sub-4:00 PB at the Berlin Marathon 16 weeks laterģ/ Both of the above in half the hours I normally devote to marathon training. When I turned up at CrossFit Hackney I was curious and hopeful, but also sceptical. Especially since I was opting for CrossFit Endurance (CFE) this is an extension of CrossFit that, as the name suggests, has been tweaked to better suit endurance athletes of all kinds. That may sound even less appealing than a speedwork session at 6.30am on a January morning, but the potential results promised from such short sessions are what sold me. In other words, you get more bang for your workout buck by spending 45-60 minutes doing an intense, all-body circuit session that leaves you a sweaty, spent mess on the gym floor, with every single muscle in your body aching and your lungs feeling as if somebody’s taken a match to them. As my coach, Josh Schouten from CrossFit Hackney, explains, it’s ‘constantly varied, functional movement to high intensity’. The CrossFit movement combines elements of cardio fitness training, weightlifting, gymnastics and core training, but puts them together to deliver a more intense workout designed to achieve better all-around fitness. That’s precisely what led me to investigate the growing popularity of strength and conditioning programme CrossFit, and what I discovered is that there’s more than one way to prepare for a 26.2. So you either set your sights on another distance (or take up another sport) or you find another way. Not everyone has the necessary free time to train properly, and not everyone’s body can cope with pounding out all those miles. Marathon training is time-consuming and hard on your body. ![]() Cue the diminutive violins, right? But behind the whingeing lies a serious point. Until late 2013 I’d run 35 marathons since taking up running in 2003, but had been stuck on my PB of 4:01 since number four, in 2006, with injury scuppering my progress on an infuriatingly regular basis. Suddenly, you have neither the time nor the fitness to achieve your goal and so another 26.2 is filed under ‘average’. ![]() The wheels are rolling smoothly down PB road – then, often without warning, injury strikes. ![]() You find the right training programme, refresh the kit drawer, alert the world on social media and start pounding the miles. See if this story sounds familiar: you sign up for a marathon and you tell yourself that this is going to be the year you nail that PB. ![]()
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