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Lance Armstrong’s marathon tips
I drove to Dripping Springs and back with Lance Armstrong the other day, interviewing him for a story about this weekend’s LiveStrong Challenge for the paper. While I had the seven-time Tour de France cycling champion trapped in a vehicle, I picked his brain about something else that was on my mind — the marathon.
Armstrong has run three marathons since he first retired from bike racing. Now that he’s going back to the bike, he’ll put running on hold for a while. But he says he’ll definitely do marathons again. And he’s full of information about how tough they are and what you need to get ready for one.
Here’s what he had to say:
“Preparation is key. (A marathon) is one of the hardest one-day efforts you can undertake. When you think of 26 miles, how many steps is that? After a certain amount of miles, of steps, your body says ‘That’s enough.’”
“This whole lesson that 20 miles is the halfway point is true. Keep that in mind. You have to start easy. The first 10 miles you have to hold yourself back. If you lose 2 minutes in the first half, you will add 30 minutes in the second half.”
Armstrong may be all about the bike, but he’s not bad at running, either. He ran his first New York City Marathon in 2 hours and 59 minutes, then knocked 13 minutes off that time the second time he did it, for a 2:46. He finished the Boston Marathon in 2:49. He also ran a negative split in that race, doing the second half faster than the first.
All that said, Armstrong says he didn’t really train properly for any of the marathons he did, although he did get more serious with each attempt. Instead, he just squeezed in runs when and where he could. He was about to get really serious and push for a 2:30 in the Chicago Marathon when he made the decision to go back to bike racing.
He also notes that he’d porked up to 182 pounds on his 5-foot, 11-inch frame. Doesn’t sound fat at all to me, but he’s back down to 168 pounds and no longer has the “muffin top” that his trainer teased him about this summer.
Nutrition, of course, is important. Armstrong says friends found it amusing that he gobbled something like 13 gels during his first marathon. It’s a lot, true, but I don’t scoff at anyone who turns in a sub-3-hour marathon. Now he says he’s backed off to eating roughly a gel every half hour during a marathon.
“(Marathons) aren’t particularly enjoyable,” he says. “They’re challenges — they keep you fit, they keep you active. And the two I’ve done, New York and Boston, the crowds are supportive.”
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By Don
October 24, 2008 9:30 AM | Link to this
Lance - is a freak of nature. His atheltic ability is crazy. To one day say I am going to run a marathon and to post the times he did is amazing.