However long you've been running, and whatever your age or ambition, chances are you'll have questions. How can you improve your race times? What's the perfect race day diet? How can you avoid overtraining? Well, now you can pose your questions

of your training, the marathon is going to be a real struggle. If you want to race or you have other commitments on Sundays, try to rearrange your week so you still complete the long run.If you couldn’t run as fast as the schedules suggested: At this stage

sleep – an extra 30-45 minutes a night. Having difficulty nodding off – and then struggling to get up the next morning – could mean that you are over-training. As you’ll see in our schedules, you will benefit from having an occasional easy week – usually

the foundation of your basic endurance and muscle strength. You won’t regret it: it will minimise your risk of injury or overtraining as you follow the schedules.Rule 2: Set a specific but realistic goalEvery plan needs a goal; the marathon is no exception

, as overtraining can also contribute to race-day blues. If all of your sessions are eyeballs-out, then come race day, there’s a good chance your legs will let you down just when you need them most. Make sure that you never follow a hard training day with another

to build up slowly, and be prepared to revise your marathon goal. Better to aim low and be pleasantly surprised than to doggedly overtrain and face almost-certain disappointment on race-day.Q: I've got a last-minute charity entry.A: The key here is damage

© Getty Images The two Olympic marathons held last August in Beijing were literally races for the ages. Kenya's Samuel Wanjiru, then 21, broke more than an Olympic record with his 2:06:32 win; he crushed long-held conventional

of ultras and mountain races in the past 15 years, including half tour of Mont Blanc in August this year. My advice would be not to overdo the mileage. You can never really train for a 50-mile race by doing a 50-mile training run, as you would just get

improvements is all about the overall mixture - how you put long runs, speedwork, tempo sessions, rest and warm-up races together. The single most important session though is the long, slow steady run.Q. I was hoping for a sub-4:00 marathon but have been

the national long-distance triathlon championships, and decided to take three months unpaid leave from work so that I could train full-time. I ended up finishing tenth. I had a terrible race, and was exhausted from beginning to end. I had overdone my training