Running a Marathon under 3 hours is a very respectable goal. As a benchmark, it indicates that as a runner you have at least a little talent and enough dedication to training and hard work to bring that talent out.
There is even a blog, Cloud It is more than a few runners that are interested in breaking the 3 hour barrier for a marathon. Why put this treatise on how to run a marathon in under 3 hours on a forum about the Bridger Ridge Run?
In my experience, if you can run a standard marathon in under 3 hours, you are capable of running the Ridge Run under 4 hours. See the post on how to estimate your Ridge Run Finish Time. A sub 4 hour Ridge Run garners a heck of a lot of respect in the local community. After many failed personal attempts at trying to break 3 hours in the Marathon using various training plans, I finally succeed by focusing on the bare essentials.
My purpose in writing this post is to share what worked for me. No more, no less than what is required to attain the goal. When I finally broke 3 hours for a marathon, I was nearly 50 years old and injury prone.
My training approach was to train just hard enough to be able to run a 3 hour marathon, but not train so hard that I got injured. A delicate razors edge balance between training and recovering to avoid injury. I stripped out all running and training that was not exactly specific to the goal of running a 3 hour marathon. In the end, I realized, I needed only three different focused workouts a week, affording lots of recovery days.
