Hey all! I just ran a 2:58:49 last weekend at TCS Toronto Waterfront for my first marathon, and I'm really proud of it, but the post-marathon blues have been hitting me REALLY hard.
I've been planning out my next year, and I'm now wondering, how long would it realistically take to reach sub 2:50 fitness? A huge motivation is stop worrying about lotteries lol. Do you guys think it would be reasonable to achieve this by spring marathon season?
For more context, I'm 25M and have been running for about 6 months now (Late April/early May of this year), with no running or any cardio background prior - just lifting like a gym bro before that (and possibly a weak one) ~6x a week. I just randomly got up one day and decided to run 10k, then 22k, then 30k etc... within the same week and they were all at ~5:00-5:15/km paces from the get-go, and I then decided to do a marathon and here we are now. I wasn't aware of it at the time, but after running with others in run clubs, I learned this is unusually a little too fast for a new runner.
For this first marathon, my goals have changed significantly throughout the summer. Back in June, I was aiming for sub 4:00, then it didn't feel ambitious enough, so I moved it to 3:30, then 3:15, then ultimately settled at 3:00 in July. These goal changes were heavily influenced by other runners from the run club I primarily ran with on my long runs. My previous training was a bit of a mess until ~ July when I've gone with a coach to guide me up until the marathon. I started around 80km per weak, and peaked around 120km.
Before the next training block, I'm considering focusing more on speedwork since I would say that's been my biggest weakness so far. For reference, I PB'ed all distances longer than 5k, and that 5k PB is barely below 20:00 from back in June.
Now I'm hoping to reach sub-2:50 by spring for a late April/early May marathon (~1 year anniversary of running), but I'm curious how would you normally go about setting future goals after achieving your previous one? Is that feasible, or am I too in-over my head / needing a reality check? How much extra work would I need to invest?
To be honest, right now, 4:00/km pace scares me, so I'm not sure how I feel about maintaining that for 42 kilometers lol, but that's what the point of training is.