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Comment by dougSF70 | Hacker News Reader

At the age of 52 I ran my first marathon, not an organized race, I just picked a day, trained and ran it with a friend (an Ultra runner) who paced me round. I will never be fast but the sense of accomplishment of even a 10k or a 5k makes running such great form of exercise for the reasonably fit person.

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I ran my first half marathon earlier this year; I am 48. I'm slow but before two years ago I'd never run so much as a 5k.

I would like to run a full marathon someday but I have no desire to run "quickly" for such a distance; I honestly think the training for that would leave me in worse shape than I am now.

It can be done with 16 weeks of training, 3 runs a week 10k, 15k, 20-25k. Each run you just need to train running the last 5k at a faster pace.

are those the total distance per week, or per run?

Per run

Per run. Training for a 42km race, you have to train some endurance (put the length in).

Can you elaborate on this or do you have a link to more info?

If you are on strava , you can see my training log.

> I have no desire to run "quickly" for such a distance

Don't run it "quickly" then. I know a bunch of people who are normally in the 5:30-6:15 range for a marathon (and several of them are well into the multi-100s of marathons run). If you have "6 hour" runs[1] near you, they're probably a good option for working up to / slowly doing a marathon.

[1] Run as many laps as you want in 6 hours. Handy for slow marathons because you know there'll be people around for at least 7 hours. Handy for bailing at a half / 10k / etc. since you can't DNF after you've done one lap.

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