This Is the Best Way to Boost Late-Race Durability, According to Experts
The final miles of a marathon can crush even well-trained runners. A pace that once felt smooth and controlled suddenly feels almost impossible to hold onto. Your breathing rate picks up, your heart rate climbs, your legs get heavy, and every step demands more.
But that late-race fade is not just a matter of mental toughness. You can actually train your body to hold up better when the race gets hard.
Researchers are paying more attention to this factor—the ability to maintain performance through the later miles of a marathon—often known as physiological resilience or durability. While marathoners tend to focus on metrics like VO2 max, lactate threshold, and running economy, those numbers usually don’t tell the full story, especially when it comes to running for hours.
Runner’s World previously consulted experts in the distance running field to explain everything you need to know about this phenomenon, and they all came to the conclusion: The two best ways to improve how your body handles late-race stress are also the most straightforward. Here’s how to use them to run your fastest marathon.
What Is Physiological Resilience?
At a basic level, physiological resilience is your body’s ability to hang onto its baseline fitness as fatigue builds, Cliff Pittman, CPT, ultrarunning coach at Carmichael Systems, previously wrote for Runner’s World. The better you are at doing this, the more likely you are to stay strong and steady when other runners begin to fade.
Benedikt Meixner, a researcher at Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg in Germany, previously told Runner’s World that VO2 max, lactate threshold, and running economy are “start-line values.” They describe what your body can do when you’re fresh—not hours into a marathon.
For example, two runners can display similar metrics and feel equally smooth in the early miles of a marathon but look completely different when mile 22 rolls around. One runner may still be cruising along while the other is struggling. The difference may come down to how much their physiology deteriorates under hours of stress.
The Simple Strategies That Build Resilience
The best ways to boost physiological resilience are maintaining a relatively high weekly mileage (without doing so much that you increase your injury risk) and prioritizing a regular long run, according to experts.
That advice may sound too simple, but it’s the heart of what durability is all about. If you want your body to resist decline over time, you have to give it regular exposure to sustained effort, wrote Pittman.
Here’s how to make sure you nail those strategies.
1. Start With a Strong Weekly Mileage Base
The larger your training volume, the more opportunities your cardiovascular and metabolic systems have to adapt to prolonged effort, Pittman explained.
Of course, establishing consistency and high volume takes time. You don’t want to jump into running 100-plus miles in a week, like Sabastian Sawe, or even bump up from 25 miles a week to 50. You may need to start with a base-building plan before you even begin a marathon program so you can maximize volume, without increasing injury risk.
The key is finding the optimal mileage that still allows you to recover well, stay healthy, and get stronger from each workout you do.
Unsure of what a solid weekly mileage goal looks like? Jeff Gaudette, owner and head coach at RunnersConnect, recommended these general weekly mileage guidelines for marathon training based on your running experience level:
2. Emphasize Your Weekly Long Run
The long run is the most race-specific workout marathoners do. It teaches your body to keep working as effort rises, fuel levels fluctuate, and muscles begin to fatigue.
Your body cannot adapt to two hours of sustained aerobic effort without actually doing two hours of sustained aerobic effort, Pittman wrote. That’s why the long run matters so much. It’s where physiological drift actually shows up in training—the point of your run where you start to use more energy to sustain the same pace—and where your body learns to manage and improve durability.
For marathon runners, Runner’s World training plans span 16 to 20 weeks and follow these long-run guidelines:
Matt Rudisill is an Associate Service Editor who has been with Runner's World since 2025. A Nittany Lion through-and-through, Matt graduated from Penn State in 2022 with a degree in journalism and worked in communications for the university's athletic department for three years as the main contact and photographer for its nationally-ranked cross country and track & field teams. Matt was also heavily involved in communications efforts for Penn State football, men's basketball, and women's gymnastics. In his role with Runner's World, Matt has interviewed Olympians, world champions, and countless experts in the field to create service content that helps runners of all ages and experience levels train smarter and race faster. When he’s not out jogging, Matt can be found tweeting bad takes about the Phillies or watching movies.
