I have used the Hansons plan for the full marathon. I made a custom plan between their Beginner and Advanced (dubbed Intermediate, so clever). I was leery of the 16 miles being the longest distanced run as well. But since my racing hadn't been going as well as I wanted I was willing to give it a try. I never really worried during all of the training about only going to 16 miles. My mindset was someone else used to tell me "you had to do 20 miles" or "you had to do 20 miles multiple times" or "you had to do X'. I trusted those plans and ran with it and didn't run as I was hoping. I went into the Hansons plan trusting their philosophy like I had trusted others. When it came to the end of the training cycle right before the taper I wondered still, was 16 miles going to be enough? The proof was during the taper to me. I got soooo much stronger in those last 10 days. I never felt overly tired during the 18 weeks of training, but when I started to taper in the last 10 days I was like "OMG, THIS is what I used to feel like before the 18 week training!" I had gotten so used to this medium level fatigue that it had become my new normal, but when the taper started and I was finally 100% recovered from training it was SUCH a different feeling.
I went into the race with the mindset of "run the first 10 miles as if they are easy". You haven't felt this good in 18 weeks so let's just take it easy. Once I hit the 10 mile mark, I thought to myself "Alright, NOW the marathon really starts!" I have trained for these last 16 miles and now its time to attack it. I've posted this before but my last half of my marathon was FASTER than any sole half-marathon I had EVER run (I had run 11 halfs at that point). It was proof to me that their plan worked. I always like to post this graph which shows my finishing times of marathon and half-marathon over time. So if you use the same mindset "I'm training for the last 16 miles of the marathon, and not I made it to 16 miles now I have to run 10 more that I've ever done", I think it makes a world of a difference. I've since used their philosophy and others to start creating my own training ideas (a hybrid of sorts).
There are two main keys to Hansons working for others. The pacing is stringent. You must adhere to trying to run the prescribed pace at every interval. If you are running 8 miles at TEMPO, that doesn't mean run 4 of them 1 minute faster than TEMPO and 4 of them 1 minute slower than TEMPO. It means run as close as you can to the prescribed pace every time. Secondly, consistency is king. For the concept of cumulative fatigue to work, you need to be consistently running the distances, paces, and days the plan requests. This consistency over time pays huge dividends. Boiled down, their plan can be summarized like this: "Run enough each day that you are tired but could have done more, but not so much in any day that it prevents you from meeting tomorrow's running goals."
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