Forgive the personal nature of this question, but how fat are you? Are you running to lose weight? Or have you come to Runner's World because you feel a little on the large side and don't know how to start? Unless you've spent

sessions to improve their outright speed. And while quicker times are one of the benefits of intervals, they’re also vital for runners who simply want to improve their endurance. That’s why not every interval session needs to be a lung-burster. To improve

, sodium, calcium and magnesium in your diet. You can also incorporate plyometric exercises (ie bounding and hopping) into your sessions, to improve the strength and endurance of your leg muscles. An ideal time to incorporate plyometrics is before a speed

coach train for 5Ks in the summer. Why not have a go at this distance on the track, as well as the road. You’ll retain the endurance benefits of your marathon training, and working on your speed in the summer will help you to perform better over 10K, 10

should not enable you to run faster next year. It’s partly a question of how much time you have and partly a matter of avoiding injury. Use the next month or so to train mainly for the 10K, doing two fast sessions a week at around 10K pace and aiming

’s more, you have a great endurance base which can be used as a platform for your next venture, provided that you give yourself time to recover after a marathon. Six weeks is the minimum interval between marathon-type efforts because you need at least two

this period, I seem to have answered the same questions again and again.In my penultimate month of writing for RW before I finally pulled the dustsheet over my word processor, I thought I’d give you the answers to a few of those questions. If the answers seem

repetitions will increase your speed endurance – allowing you run harder for longer. And just as the endurance training you’ve gained from marathons will help you over the shorter distances, so this faster training will help when you return to marathon

to increase your iron stores through diet or iron supplementation.—Ellen Coleman, nutritionist and author of Eating For Endurance

distance first.A The basic training for a half-marathon is the same as for a 10K, because performance is directly related to oxygen intake – your basic running speed. However, there’s obviously an extra endurance factor, which has to be taken into account