What I told the AFR about breaking three hours

The Australian Financial Review asked me a simple question for a piece on breaking three hours: what are your top tips? The answer that ran was tight and correct. Consistency, discipline, good long runs, and not chasing a magic number of weekly kilometres. This is the version with room to breathe, the way I would explain it to a runner I coach.

You can read the original at the Australian Financial Review (subscription).

Consistency, the boring kind

You are not going to come into this from nothing and run really fast. My own first marathon was 2:30 in 2022, and it did not appear out of nowhere. There were eight years of endurance sport behind it, first running at university, then years of duathlon and triathlon. That is what let me handle the training when I finally pointed everything at the marathon.

So the honest first tip is patience. Get a few years of consistent running under your belt before you train seriously for a marathon. Not because of your lungs, but because of your legs. Muscles, tendons and ligaments take a long time to build the durability that weekly marathon volume asks of them, and that timeline does not respond to enthusiasm. It responds to months.

Less running, but more specific

Here is the line from the piece I would underline: what works for one person does not work for another, and a lot of people could get away with doing less, but more specific running, rather than a whole bunch of volume that is not doing anything useful.

Weekly kilometres are the number everyone reaches for because they are easy to count. They are also the wrong target. A runner adding junk miles to hit an arbitrary total is usually just adding fatigue. The runners who improve are the ones who ask a better question: what is this week's training actually for, and is every hard session earning its place? That is specificity, and it is worth more than volume almost every time.

The long run is the session that matters

If running is already a habit, you are likely looking at six to eight hours a week to have a real shot at sub-three. The lever inside that number is the long run.

A good two-hour long run every week, or every second week, across the three months before your marathon puts you in a strong position. And it should not all be easy. I have the runners I coach spend time in the back half faster than easy pace, up around the top of zone 2 or the bottom of zone 3, roughly 70 per cent of max heart rate. That is the effort that builds marathon endurance rather than just time on feet.

Ten to twelve weeks out, start folding marathon-pace work into it. A two-hour run where the back half carries three by ten minutes at goal pace teaches your body the specific demand of race day. The aim is to get as close as you can to a marathon without destroying yourself in training.

Discipline is really a scheduling problem

Consistency sounds like willpower. In practice it is structure. You have to make running fit into your life so that it is actually achievable, whether that means 5am before the kids are up, a lunch break, or straight after work.

Then weigh the second-order effects, because they are where plans quietly fail. If you are running at 5am, an earlier bedtime is not optional, it is part of the session. Sleep is not something you fit around training. It is the thing that lets training stick. Shortchange it and the work you did stops turning into fitness. Of everything on this list, protecting sleep is the habit I would defend hardest.

Keep fuelling simple

Nutrition is where people overcomplicate things fastest. Eat enough food to fuel the training, first and foremost. Get enough carbohydrate, get some protein, and do not overthink the rest.

On race day, around 60 grams of carbohydrate an hour is a good starting point, but the real work happens in training: practise taking gels or other carbs on your long runs so your gut can tolerate them when it counts. And drink. A few sips of water at every aid station is a simple approach that holds up.

The thread through all of it

None of this is a secret, and none of it is complicated. It is the same idea underneath everything we do at the Clinic: the right work, done consistently, made specific to the event, with recovery treated as part of the plan and not an afterthought. The magic was never in the volume. It is in doing the useful things, and doing them for long enough to count.

If you want that turned into a week-by-week plan built from your own recent running, you can build one for free. It is the same method, set to your paces.