How will I know I can run 26 miles in the marathon when the longest training run is only 20 miles?
A. Have faith. The finishing rate for the approximately 2,000 runners who sign up each summer for the CARA Marathon Training Class in Chicago is close to 99 percent, and they all follow my program with its longest run being 20 miles. Hundreds of thousands have benefited from this same program in my best-selling book, Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide, or using my programs on the Internet. I consider the distance between 20 and 26 miles to be sacred ground, thus you are only allowed to step into it with a race number on your chest. When I was running at the elite level, I sometimes trained as far as 31 miles (50-K) in a single run, and all it did was increase my fatigue level and cause me to become injured. In fact, avoiding injury is the main reason I stop runners at 20 miles for their long runs. I was at a post-marathon party one year and talked to a woman who had pulled a muscle in the 24th mile of a 26-mile workout dictated by another coach. If that had happened in the marathon,
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