I am not even sure what a super fast marathon is. Let’s assume the benchmark is the world record, we cannot find any better: 2:00:35. But most likely you won’t be able to run a sub 2 hours marathon in any case, so you need to lower the expectations with two hours. Is that OK? Or, let’s make it one hour: sub three marathon. Would this be fast enough? Well, for me it surely would, and I saw a trend, in recent years, that under 3 hours marathon would be a bucket list delight for many runners. With a clear training plan and some cushion you have 90% chances to do it in up to two years. But this is a lot, right? So you want to learn the easy way… Luck is with you, as I have some perfect tips you can always use to put in place a super fast marathon!
The top three secret tips for running a super fast marathon
1. Go to the website of a very popular marathon, like Valencia, Berlin, or even Athens, and you will see thousands of people with a sub 3 hour marathon – that hard and seldom it is! You just need to take that performance, photoshop it with your name, post it on Instagram, and take one of those accounts which can offer you 10K followers: there you have, officially a sub three hour marathon! You can keep even the event itself, and the fact that your name cannot be found on the website, for a mild due diligence that you actually could jump from 20 kilometers / week @6:17 / km to a 2:58:17 marathon, has some solutions. You can say, and you must, that you competed under another name, because you didn’t want to take unpaid holiday from your job, so then nobody knows you are running in London, for example, instead of working from Bucharest. Also, an alternative can be to tell everybody that you hid your real participation name, because your wife knew you are tacking care of the children for the day, not running on the streets of Boston. It is that simple!
2. If you don’t like to leverage other’s work, then simply take your running app and enter manually the parameters of a run, exactly like you desire it: put a distance of 42.24 km (just to be on the safe side, and pretty symmetric also), in a time of… let’s say, 2:56:45. You might be tempted to go lower, but, hey! If you only ran a 3:47 marathon before, it will make your performance even more questionable, if you go below 2:56 or something. People might challenge your result, jealous bad people, of course. If anybody asks then why the map of the run is not displayed, you can always answer in several modes: like, for example, that you ran that on a treadmill. Or, that you prefer to not disclose your location, or the whole run itself, to not attract haters, bad energies, and tons of envy. You don’t have anything to prove to anybody! One more important tip here: just be careful when you enter the date manually to not put 65 instead of 45 – OK, I know, apps know the time limits better, but just in case! You don’t want to risk ruining your performance.
3. My favorite, and the one I find most convenient to apply, it makes you cleaner than ever, because you don’t involve other’s results, or you try to do tricks in an app which was designed for something else. Here’s the fact: just say that you have ran 43 kilometers, as you counted each of them properly, and it took you exactly 2:51:46 time, after you made the math. You can explain that the normal path was extended significantly, since you went out in the middle of a sunny day, and apart from you running with 4:07 minutes / kilometer, you avoided hundred of people, so it was a win-win situation for all! No strings attached, and you just need to be more careful this time to not say, for example, that you have completed the marathon in 2 hours 71 minutes, because your brain is not Strava and it cannot forbid the mistake, and then people might not believe you. Apart from this, the method is, indeed, my favorite!
You are welcome! Who says running a super fast marathon is hard???