Episode 54: Listen in on a Coaching Call About Running a Sub-3 Marathon

The Strength Running Podcast

It’s no easy feat to run a marathon under three hours. It’s faster than the fastest Boston Qualifying time of 3:05 (for young men) and according to one analysis, only 4% of men and just 1% of women achieve this level of performance.

An article from LiveStrong notes that:

“the nonprofit organization RunTri used the times of 230,251 finishers in 25 races to determine that in the 2011-2012 marathon season the average time for any person, regardless of gender or age, was 4 hours, 24 minutes and 0 seconds.”

I’m not familiar with either of these sources so we should be careful with the results. Let’s take them with a big grain of salt.

But still, they underscore the general idea that a sub-3 marathon is really hard! And especially for women, who weren’t born with many of the biological “tools” that aid performance (higher muscle mass, more testosterone, etc.).

So this coaching call was particularly exciting for me. Lindsey has a 3:14 personal best but that wasn’t under ideal conditions – in other words, she knows a lot of improvement is possible.

In this conversation, we discuss her training background, past race performances, and the training upgrades required to make her sub-3 marathon dream a reality.