To Break 2:45 in the Marathon, I Decided to Ignore All Rules and Run Insanely High Mileage. Here’s How It Went.
What if you threw all the rules and conventional wisdom out the window and just ran insanely high mileage with reckless abandon?
There’s a good likelihood you’d wind up injured. You might also net some PRs. And, as I learned, you might have a heck of a lot of fun.
The PR was my hope as I ramped up my mileage with the goal of running a sub-2:45 marathon in 2025. I’ve easily run sub-three hours on as little as 60 miles per week, and I’ve run higher mileage for a stretch when I was younger. So I figured, why not run as many miles as my body could handle with the hopes of clocking my fastest marathon ever? It turns out, a runner from the U.K. was doing the same thing on the other side of the world.
Jake Barraclough is a wild spirit, a guy who loves running more than anything else. Fed up with his job in 2023, he quit and moved to Japan to focus exclusively on the sport—chronicling the whole endeavor on YouTube. The 28-year-old coined the phrase “train harder, not smarter” and truly lives up to it. He quickly tripled his mileage—he ran 730 miles in September of 2025 alone—and lowered his marathon personal best from 2:38 to 2:14. While the approach earned him a sponsorship with Brooks, it also sidelined him for spells as he dealt with a blown-up calf muscle during his taper for Valencia, where he’d hoped to run 2:10, and a banged-up knee ahead of this year’s Tokyo Marathon leading to a DNF.
I tapped into Jake’s motto, hoping it would help me finish faster (minus the injuries). I began logging two and even three runs a day. My morning four-miler morphed into eight or nine miles. My weekly tally grew from 40 miles to more than 100 in just a few weeks. And my Strava training log was jam-packed with big green dots—the more miles you run, the larger they get. I forged on with my eyes on the Boston Marathon. I logged plenty of questionable runs to pad my numbers, like a four-miler titled “Junk Miles?” in the evening after a midday 10-mile progression run that finished with a 5:48 mile.
And, yes, along the way I had some setbacks. Initially, I’d been doing two workouts a week, plus a long run, on top of 10 easy runs—all of it adding up to about 14 hours of running per week. But the bump in both quantity and quality proved to be too much, as I wasn’t able to fully recover between hard sessions, so I had to back off to just one workout. Then, a work trip to Kenya and the associated jet lag caused a hiccup right when I should have been logging my highest mileage and longest tempo runs in my peak weeks of training. So, I shifted my focus to the Bayshore Marathon in Traverse City, Michigan, one month later.
In April, I still lined up for the 2025 Boston Marathon but ran it as a workout—a 10-mile warmup followed by 13 miles at marathon pace and a three-mile jog to the finish line. That’s where I truly saw all the hard weeks paying off: Even though I wasn’t racing, I still broke 3 hours. At 48, and with a lifetime PR of 2:49 set in 2019, I was pretty shocked at how great I felt all day. It truly was the easiest of my six sub-3:00 marathons in 17 years—and without a taper; I had run 100 miles the week leading up to Marathon Monday, and I even managed to run nearly 12 miles combined on two runs the next day.
Did it all pay off on race day a month later? Well . . . I woke up in Michigan with a pinch in my left butt cheek and a lightning bolt firing down my hamstring—telltale signs of piriformis syndrome, a common overuse injury. While the aggressive training could have been the cause, I chalked it up to sleeping in strange beds during race week and a 14-hour drive to Michigan. In any case, I came to race, so I dragged that left leg down the road for 26.2 miles—and finished in 2:51. I even made the podium in my age group! Having spent months working through minor aches during training, I was able to avoid a DNF when pain crept up on race day.
If you’re curious to push beyond your previous limits and chase a big marathon PR, at least one study supports running more miles and more often—especially in the eight months that lead up to a 16-week training plan. A group of sports medicine experts looked at the training logs and finish times of 917 finishers of the 2022 Boston Marathon and published their findings in theSportsMedicine Journal. When they looked at the 12- to 4-month window before a race, runners who logged more than 10 hours a week had significantly better performance (at my usual 8-minute pace, that’s 75 miles a week). Plus, every additional run per week shaved roughly three to four minutes off their finish time. Even an extra kilometer of running each week saved the runners 30 to 40 seconds.
Although I personally tolerate the high mileage volume fairly well, I don’t necessarily recommend you log 100-mile weeks during your next marathon training. For one reason, it’s just a heck of a lot of time to spend on a hobby, but it also runs counter to Runner’s World’s time-tested training advice. You should follow the “10 percent rule,” which is a guideline to gradually increase your mileage and avoid injury. In terms of how much running you really need to be doing to reach your goals, even our sub-3:00 marathon training plans top out below 60 miles per week. The reasoning is simple: You get fit enough to nail your time without being totally cooked by race day.
So, the wisest course for me would be to follow the RW advice, knowing that with modest increases, I could reap strong performances with minimal injury risk. What does that mean for my next sub-2:45 attempt at Grandma’s Marathon in June? I’m a gambling man. It’s back to the “train harder, not smarter” strategy. Who knows? Maybe this time it will pay off.
Jeff is Runner-in-Chief for Runner’s World and the director of product testing. He has tested and reviewed running shoes, GPS watches, headphones, apparel, and more for nearly two decades. He regularly tests more than 100 pairs of shoes each year, and once had a 257-day streak running in different models. Jeff can usually be found on the roads, racing anything from the mile to a marathon, but he also enjoys racing up mountains and on snowshoes. When he’s not running, you’ll probably find him hanging from a ladder making repairs and renovations to his house (he’s also director of product testing for Popular Mechanics).