Episodes
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Understanding Marathon Performance: Key Insights from New Research How to maintain your edge during long runs and marathons. The journey of every marathon runner is filled with peaks and valleys, both physically and mentally. Recent research has shed light on how our physiological responses change throughout a run and what it means for performance. The Research Breakdown In a recent study summarized in the Sports Medicine Bulletin, researchers evaluated the performance of 18 seasoned marathon runners, each averaging a marathon time of 3 hours and 17 minutes. The study aimed to uncover how key
It's been 10 years since the second edition of Hanson's Marathon Method was published. There are things I would update to the book if there were a third edition. The one area would be defeining and obtaining cumulative fatigue in the marathon plans. Give it a listen!
Today, we are going to dive into a fascinating article that’s been making the rounds regarding the performance characteristics of high-performing marathoners The study, published in Sports Medicine in September 2025, looked at the training data of 917 Boston Marathon qualifiers 1-3. It compared their training habits from 12 to 4 months before the race against their habits in the final 4 months 4. The headline that caught everyone's attention? The study suggested that decreasing your training frequency in the final 16 weeks leads to faster performances. But before you go slashing your weekly ru
We are at that time of year when a lot of you have just finished your fall marathons. You’ve crushed your goals—maybe you went from a 5-hour marathon down to a 3:45—and now you’re asking the big question: "What do I do next?" Logically, most runners think, "If I ran this fast on 50 miles a week, imagine how fast I’ll be on 60 or 70!" It’s natural to think that more miles equals better results. Now, if you know me, you know I love high mileage. I personally run 65–70 miles a week just because I enjoy it. But as a coach, I want to push back a little on the idea that you always need to increase y
Hey guys, it's Luke here! Welcome to Lesson Two of our planning guide. In Lesson One, we talked all about setting the right goals—which is absolutely crucial for runners of all abilities. If you haven't checked out the goal-setting course yet, I highly encourage you to go back and do that first so you can set realistic, actionable targets. But today, we want to move beyond just setting a goal. We are going to look at how to actually block out an entire training schedule. When I sit down to plan, I'm looking at the timeline from the end of my last race right up to the end of my next race. To ma
Mastering Your Training Paces: Goal Pace vs. Current Pace Listen up, runners! Once you’ve mapped out your training plan and laid out the structure of your mileage, the absolute most important step to take is making sure you are starting out at the correct intensity. In my early coaching days and in the first edition of the Hansons Marathon Method, I almost exclusively talked about "Goal Pace". But as we’ve grown and analyzed more data, it's become clear that starting your training block exactly at your goal pace isn't always the smartest move, especially if you haven't run a marathon in a few
Summary In this conversation, Luke discusses the essential components of successful marathon training, emphasizing the importance of endurance, stamina, consistency, understanding fatigue, and maintaining a healthy relationship with nutrition. He outlines how to build endurance and stamina, the significance of consistent training, and the need to differentiate between general fatigue and overtraining. Additionally, he highlights the importance of proper fueling for performance, encouraging runners to view food as a source of energy rather than a restriction. Takeaways Endurance is the ability
The Boston Marathon is not just a race; it's a journey that demands strategic planning and preparation. As a seasoned runner who has experienced both triumphs and challenges on this iconic course, I want to share insights that can help you run your best Boston. Understanding the Course: Boston is a course that rewards patience and punishes haste. With its rolling hills and infamous Heartbreak Hill, it's crucial to tailor your training to these unique challenges. Start by working backward from the race date, ensuring your training plan aligns with the course's demands. Training Plans: For most
Summary In this episode of the Luke Humphrey Running Podcast, Luke discusses the transition from fall marathon training to preparing for spring marathons. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining training consistency during the off-season and provides insights into effective training strategies, including volume building and speed work. Luke outlines two scenarios for runners looking to improve their marathon times and offers practical advice for winter training considerations. Takeaways -Fall marathons are ending, and spring training begins in January.-Focus on maintaining training consist
Transcript: Hey guys, this is Luke Humphrey. Welcome back to the Luke Humphrey running podcast. I appreciate all the great feedback from the last one. Yes, the audio is much better, right? And so I think that will be a much better listening experience. And a lot of you reconfirmed what I was kind of aware of. A lot of you listen to the podcast while you're running or doing whatever. It's nice to have that instead of just a YouTube video, which I would tend to agree with. In today's episode, I'd like to discuss the prerequisites for the HMM beginner plan, as they seem to be a fairly common sour
Transcript:Hey everyone, welcome back to the LHR podcast. It's been a while. We've been revamping a lot of stuff behind the scenes on our website and things like that. fortunately the podcast took a little bit of a backseat, but I think we're back now. I think we're going to be in a position where we can do things much more regularly. when I was going back and looking at some stuff, you know, we got some pretty old, it's a pretty old content that probably needs to be updated. So, Be on lookout for that, just some new updates on some old topics, maybe more just really improving the quality of t
As a coach or an athlete, we look for guides as to how much work is an appropriate amount for a given athlete. I have mentioned this before, but again, often we discuss the 80/20 rule in training- 80% of our work should be easy and 20% hard. The question then becomes what is hard and what is easy, and in terms of hard, how should that look? So, I’d like to break down some general guidelines. In terms of the 20%, for most of my athletes, that’s going to be anything faster than half marathon pace. However, when talking about true definitions of hard, researchers will argue that 20% is anything h
In the third part of this series, I want to discuss the race itself. In particular, the challenge of the potential weather. This comes in two parts. The first is the time of year the race is and the second is the different start and finish locations. Today, let’s discuss the potential weather. In a dream year (2011), you get solid temps and a 30 mph tailwind. What’s interesting is that was the world’s “best” time that was not allowed to be a record, but now 2:03 for the men’s isn’t anything and you can just strap a pair of special shoes on your feet for instant fitness. Eh, I digress. In any c
In part one, we talked a little bit about timing, but more specifically how training starts at maybe the worst timing of the year- the holiday season. Today, I want to expand once into what will really affect a lot of people- the winter months! Where I am at, in metro Detroit, winters aren’t too bad through the end of December. We might get some snow, but there’s been plenty of times when we don’t have any snow on the ground. The problem is, once January rolls around, the average high is below freezing and whatever snow we get is usually stuck until March! We might not get a ton of snow, but i
I read an interesting article from Steve Magness the other day, “How the need to prove yourself in practice can ruin your race day.” In the beginning, he listed some crazy fast workouts he did before a race but then faltered on race day. He came to two conclusions which I thought were great: Getting fit is easy If you are sufficiently motivated, it is easy to train yourself into the ground. Over the rest of the article, he discussed how it was a coach's job to make sure you expressed the fitness you had gained in training in the form of quality race results. He also discussed how it was his ow
We have talked a lot about adjusting workouts due to heat and humidity for quite some length, but what about strategies to cool ourselves before or during workouts so that we don’t have to adjust our paces? I wanted to explore this a little bit more as I thought about people attempting last-chance qualifiers in early September and even those racing into the middle of October. I mean, I have run the Chicago Marathon wearing gloves and a beanie in 34 degrees and I’ve slogged through it at 80 degrees. That early fall weather can be hit or miss. I had thought about the ice vest, and even own one,
Alright, as summer gets ready to peak, some of you are questioning why you decided to train for a September or October marathon! Many of you are not hitting your paces and question not only your sanity but your fitness levels too! Well, I can assure you that if you can trust that your training is still working, that good things can happen this fall. Now, that is not the big idea here, but rather, what I feel are your best options for adjusting your workouts so that you don’t dig a hole too deep to get out of. Before we go into this though, I have to preface with some tough love. The only way y
You might find yourself in a situation where you plug in a goal marathon time and the training paces for speed, which represent 5k to 10k race pace, don’t line up with what you have actually raced. What should you do? If your actual race pace is slower than what is suggested based on your goal time, then I would usually have the athlete do the slower pace. Why? Well, we aren’t necessarily trying to improve top 5k speed during the marathon as it’s just not the priority of the segment. Of course, there are exceptions to this. If you are attempting to race some 5k’s over a summer period, then jum
As I write this, we are in the build up for the fall marathon season. For the early October races, we are into about 6 weeks. More advanced runners are cranking into workouts while beginners are just starting more intensity. Regardless of the level of the runner, it is far too early to be complaining of the dreaded “cumulative fatigue.” Yet, so often I will see people saying that they are just completely out of it and not sure if they are going to make it. That is a tough spot to be with that long left to go. Like anything in life, it’s usually not just one thing that is causing the issue, but
It seems like all easy running is the same, and I was in the camp of indifference for a long time, I grew to realize that as we advance in ability, how we approach our easy runs will change with the circumstance. I’ll be honest, I know what I want to convey in this post, but I am struggling with how to present it, or at least get the conversation started. So, let’s start with a common scenario that I see. The runner finishes a training segment and takes some down time. They come back and the first several runs are really easy. This typically lasts a week or two. The runner gets into a groove a
Every coach I had, from high school to professional was a stickler for pace. That’s not to say that we weren’t monitoring other variables, but the pace was what we focused on. It’s safe to say that over the years, I became pretty good at judging effort and correlating that closely to paces. To say it’s a skill is an understatement, and from the feedback I get from athletes, is that it’s not a skill that can be learned quickly enough. So, hopefully, we can get you on the right path if you find yourself struggling. The biggest issues I see with runners are: Looking at their watch all the time! O
When we talk about long runs, the long run for the marathon is always the primary debate. For shorter races, even up to the half marathon, the long run is further than the race distance or at least up to a big percentage of what you’ll be racing. Yet, for the marathon, unless you go 20+ miles, the long run is going to not going to approach those same percentages. With that, when I prescribe a 16-mile long run, they are hesitant, if not downright defiant about not doing 16 miles. I don’t want to rehash some of the things I have discussed at length some of the attributes of the marathon length,
In my Boston Marathon training plans, I have a lot of specific hill-based workouts. Some straight uphill repeats, some workouts I call “Tired Hills”, some downhill repeats towards the end of the long run, and maybe a few other things. However, I don’t specifically say when a person should get on hills for the marathon tempos. I do this on purpose, but I also recognize that this should be addressed. First, let’s look at what we are trying to accomplish with the marathon tempo. 1) learn pace. Some will argue that you aren’t in the right “zone” but to purposely skip out on learning what your race
So I got done a bit of a rabbit hole the other day. I follow the accounts of My Sport Science and the feed is great if you want to learn anything about nutrition and supplementation for endurance performance. Well, a new blog entitled, "Do ketone esters boost EPO?” And I thought, well wouldn’t that be nice? I knew a little bit about ketones, but more about ketones as a product of high-fat low-carb diets, and not supplementation. Ketone Esters, now that’s another story. Ketones themselves are byproducts of fat metabolism and can be used as fuel, which is why they have gotten so much attention l
From my experience, you have a deep division in the running world when you mention the word “treadmill.” For some, it’s a necessary part of being able to train during winter, dark mornings, and not leaving children alone in the home. For others, they’d rather fall and break a hip on black ice than submit themselves to “lesser” training on a treadmill. For me, it’s an available tool and as a younger man, I was probably in the latter camp. However, with each passing year, I have less to prove to anyone, and would rather stay healthy than force an unnecessary training error. If you are still in t
