I don’t profess to be an expert in this topic, but can share my experiences. I was interested in running multiple marathons. I was in awe in people like Eddie Izzard and Ben Smith (401 marathons in 401 days) that run a marathon every day. I had never ran at all the day after a marathon, not even one mile. What would happen if I ran the day after a marathon?

I had arranged a ‘5 in 5’ event on the Isle of Wight in 2020, but of course that was not possible when Covid happened, so in 2021, I set a date for myself to run 3 marathons in 3 days, now I needed to train for it.

This is where I’d love to tell you about some clever training plan I cooked up, but truth be told, it was all taken care of for me by Jonny Mellor (JM Coaching). I agreed what the plan was in terms of the runs, and Jonny set about cooking up some training for me.

The key to this was mileage. The most I’ve run in a year is 1,200 miles, and at the point in 2021 of doing this challenge, I’m on pace to be on for 1,800 miles for the year, so it has got me out doing 50% more miles than I’ve ever run before.

Unsurprisingly, the training is about combinations of runs, and the plan gave me successive days of running 10 and 12 miles, then 10, 12, 14, another weekend might have a 10 and a 20 or 16 miles one days followed by a half marathon. All in preparation for running multiple days on tired legs.

Running lots of miles is hard of course, but having the input of Jonny kept motivation high. I know I couldn’t have kept getting out there if I’d cooked up the training plan myself.

I once asked a friend of mine who is a really talented runner how I could improve. He told me there is no point running 50 or 60 miles a week if it then means you run 10 or 15 miles the next week, you need to pick a target like 40 miles a week, and then stack the weeks up.

In my training for my multi event challenge, 40 miles became my benchmark, and from January through to March, I managed to run 40 miles each week for 10 weeks in a row. I’m hoping that will be the foundation of some good results.