Pete Pfitzinger

Two years ago I limped across the finish line of my first marathon. While I boast that I ran a sub-four hour marathon, I can't boast by much. My time was 3:59:56. After a year off, I've decided to return to the scene of the crime and better my results. This is where Advanced Marathoning comes in.

Advanced Marathoning is a set of training plans for people who regularly run 50km, 88km, or 105km per week. (In case you're curious, I'm in the first category!) These training plans are a third of show more the book. The rest is dedicated to no-nonsense sports science.

Every element of training—nutrition, strength training, hydration, and even tapering—is discussed in detail. After finishing reading these chapters, the articles in my Runner's World subscription read like a children's book!

I don't know how well I'll run this fall, but I do know a lot more about training than my first time around. show less

If you are ready to move beyond running for pure pleasure and want to set goals to improve your times, this is a good place to start. In my own experience, when I started to try to run faster races, I began a series of injuries that move about from one part of the body to another. Using a book like this may be able to help a runner build up slowly and safely while training properly. It includes simple and useful strength training exercises to build the core and details ways to vary your show more workouts in important ways.

The one critique I have of the book is that it encourages running every day or only taking one day off a week. While this may work for some people and may be necessary to really reach one's full potential, I found that running every day caused more injuries than it's worth. Alternating running days with days of cross-training or rest can help prevent overtraining, can keep your body balanced, and can give the running muscles time to recover. But the training programs and suggestions in this book can be easily altered for one who wants to incorporate more rest and/or cross training. show less

Context: I ran D-III XC and track, and have since run a small handful of marathons a little under 3 hours. Some of the book is rather obvious to me, but those parts seem very helpful to people without my background. Some parts are not at all obvious to me, in particular some of the differences between training for 5K-10K and training for a marathon. (Instead of doing 2 8-milers, I now do an 11 and a 5.)

I wish the book went a little further into detail about how the training plans were show more designed and paces were chosen, but it's very comprehensive and I will be using it as a reference throughout my training. show less

If you ever wanted one book to provide guidance to training for multiple distances, as well as to better understand the physiology behind the recommended training routines, this is your book. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone who wants to improve their running, or anyone who needs good ideas of how to safely train and care for themselves. There are portions of the book that are a bit dry science, but there is also a healthy dose of real-life stories of accomplished runners who show more can motivate the rest of us to do our best.

I received this book as a part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program in exchange for my honest review. show less