The Real Reason Your Sub-3 Keeps Blowing Up (And the Fix That Actually Works)

[00:00:00] Most runners chasing sub-three, they’ll probably never get there, not because they’re lazy and not because they don’t have the engine. They’re trying to pull themselves towards a number instead of letting their fitness push them past it. I’ve run sub-three hours once. That was eight years ago, and the last 10 kilometers, six miles, it absolutely broke me.

[00:00:19] I limped around with a knee injury for months, and I couldn’t run at all. I also coach a guy named Brenton who’s been chasing sub-three hours for years. He’s not the problem. The problem is what every sub-three hour piece of content has been telling him to do. Today, you’re gonna get four things you probably won’t get from other sub-three content on the internet.

[00:00:37] The first thing is the three-lens system to train and race smarter. It’s based on pace, heart rate, and effort all working together. This is the part that I don’t think anyone’s really teaching. Two, the mistake every standard sub-three plan makes with an actual study on sub-elite marathoners that proves it.

[00:00:52] Three, a sub-three hour training plan that puts all this theory right into action, right into order for you. And last, why you should zoom out and expect your sub-three to take possibly one, two, maybe even three years. That matters. I’m Daren D Lake, runner of 30 years, sub-three hour marathoner. I’m a certified run coach for runners from sub-three hours all the way up to six, seven-hour marathon finishers.

[00:01:15] I’ve blown up enough of my own marathons to know exactly what doesn’t work, so don’t make that mistake. And here’s the first mistake that most runners chasing sub-three actually do. They pick the number first. These are people probably around 310, 315. They’re like, “I wanna run sub-three.” It’s round, it’s clean, it’s world-class adjacent ’cause you get into that two-hour number.

[00:01:35] Then they try to reverse that three-hour number, and they try to break it down, which is smart. You know, you go 650 per mile, which is 415 per kilometer, and you’ll get 259.59. That’s the goal pace. So that becomes the training pace too. Again, these people, they’re running like 310, 315, maybe even 320. Their long runs are 650, 415 pace.

[00:01:56] Marathon pace efforts for tempo runs. They’re slightly faster than marathon pace, which is 650 per mile, 415 per kilometer. Race day at marathon pace. The plan looks absolutely amazing on paper. The math checks out. I call it becoming a sub-three hour spreadsheet runner. It’s like all theory. So they follow it for 12 weeks, sometimes 16.

[00:02:16] They show up to race day fit and ready and convinced. Then somewhere around 18 to 22 miles, that’s kilometer 29 to 34-ish, the wheels come off, pew-pew-pew-pew-pew. The heart rate creeps up, the pace drops, the form gets real wild . The brain starts going, “Ah, you should stop.” They walk through the aid stations and cross the line at 308, 311, 315.

[00:02:40] Then they tell themselves they need to train harder for the next one. And that guy that I coach, Brenton, who’s been doing this for years, sub-three hour marathon pace on his three-hour long runs. His heart rate during those long runs Zone four-ish creeping into zone five, and his heart rate during race day zone four creeping into zone five, like pretty much like the whole race.

[00:02:57] I love you, Brenton, if you’re watching this. Much love, man. I respect what he can suffer through. Like I legit could not run zone four, zone five for three hours. Like I, I, I don’t know how he does that. I don’t know how people do that out there. The issue is what the work ethic is being applied to. He’s pulling himself towards sub-three and not letting his fitness push him there.

[00:03:15] Those are different things. Most plans don’t tell you which one you’re doing, and I’m gonna tell you exactly what’s the difference between push and pull because it is huge once you figure that out. All right, here’s a quick self-check you can do right now today or this week in your training. If you wanna know if you’re pulling, try this.

[00:03:28] Run an easy run at 30 minutes. Like it should feel like a two out of 10, three out of 10 easy. Check your average heart rate. If it’s above 75% of your max, so if the run is like, you know, in that zone three-ish, zone four area, you’re not running easy. You’re already pulling even on the days you’re supposed to feel chill.

[00:03:48] All right, so this isn’t my opinion. There’s a 2020 study from the University of Paris. They pulled Strava data from 280 sub-elite marathoners running 230 to 340 at Paris and Berlin marathons. 77% of them blew up. The researchers literally called them fallers because their pace cratered around the 26K mark.

[00:04:06] So that’s about mile 14 to 16-ish. But check this though. The fallers, they ran 56% of the marathon above their average pace before the wall hit. They started way too hard. So that means like they were like redlining way before the wall like at kilometer five, mile three, uh, kilometer, you know, 10, et cetera.

[00:04:24] The cost showed up as cardiac drift, which is a fancy way of saying your heart rate, uh, just keeps going up and up and up while your pace stays the same or falls apart late. It’s like, “What’s going on? I’m slowing down, but ah, I feel really tired.” So how do you make sure you’re in the 23%? That’s exactly what my free sub-three hour marathon training plan maps out.

[00:04:42] I made it so that you can avoid being in that 77% that, uh, blew up, and so that you could run exact paces, heart rate zones, and effort prompts all mapped out across the 22 weeks. And as a bonus, you’ll also build up your mental fitness, gotta get that mind right, and avoid injury with my free email course.

[00:04:59] It’s six emails in your inbox that take five minutes a day, uh, or less, so you can get 1% better the right way. This all happens auto magically. You don’t gotta do anything, just sign up. Uh, give me your email. It’s all good. Right here at the QR code or the link below in the description of wherever you’re listening, open up the show notes.

[00:05:15] But the plan only works if you understand why the standard approach blows up 77% of runners, and it comes down to the next section, physics. Pushing something is way more efficient than pulling it. Push a heavy box across the floor instead of dragging it with a rope Pushing wins. Less wasted energy. More direct force on the thing you’re trying to move.

[00:05:35] Think of it like pushing a wheelbarrow or a shopping cart in the grocery store. It’s always way easier to push than it is to pull. It’s the same with marathon training, I’m gonna argue. When you pull yourself towards a number, you’re spending willpower constantly. Every workout is a fight to hit a pace your body isn’t ready for because it’s a round number.

[00:05:52] Your body doesn’t care about the numbers. It doesn’t even understand that. Every long run, it drains more than it builds, and every taper feels like you’re hiding from the weaknesses instead of fixing them. When you let your fitness push you, the math, it flips. Training feels appropriately hard, not impossible.

[00:06:07] Your aerobic base actually grows, and your threshold actually rises. Your race pace becomes a thing your body has earned, not a number that you’re hoping to hit. Here’s how I learned this the hard way. So I finished four marathons in my running career life. Number one was an Ironman in June 2016. Number two was a road marathon five months later, November 2016.

[00:06:26] I assumed my Ironman fitness was still there even though I was not training like that from June to November. Both went over four hours. Both hurt. Number three was October 2018, so it was two years later. I was like, “Redemption, gotta get this.” Uh, I figured that, ’cause I was training for 5K and 10K about three, four months before that, I was like, “Yo, I’m fit enough.”

[00:06:46] I just added 7 to 10 kilometers, uh, on my long run, so that’s about four to six miles each week for three weeks. I said, “Let me just do one week more, one week more, one week more.” This is one of the dumbest training plans that I could’ve ever done, that any human could ever do. I learned a lot about progressive overload, recovery, and how brutal the marathon actually is.

[00:07:06] I was on pace through 30 kilometers, 18 miles, and then the last 12K became a survival mission. I crossed the line in 2:59:57. It took me weeks to walk normally. And number four was April 2025, where I attempted to pace Brenton and coach him to the sub-three. Uh, so six and a half years later, different problem.

[00:07:29] I knew I could hold sub-three pace at zone two, low zone three for most of the race. So I ramped up zone two hard. Way too hard. My hip flexors, they were like, “Yo bro, not feeling this.” And then I got hamstring issues six weeks out from race day. I crossed at 3:01 something, uh, which I’m still happy with, considering I really wasn’t training for those six, seven years for the marathon.

[00:07:52] So across all four marathons though, I’ve never finished one feeling good. Like, throughout, where I’m like, “Yay, I’m crushing this. This is really good.” Not once. And this year, hopefully, if my life can cooperate, I’m gonna do something different. My goal is three hours, 30 minutes. I’m not training for a number.

[00:08:06] I just know that I could run high zone one, low zone two around the three hour 30 minute marathon finishing pace. Some people might see that as me giving up I think it’s the opposite. I’m letting my actual current fitness dictate the race instead of demanding my body do something it hasn’t earned the right to do yet.

[00:08:22] That doesn’t mean sub-three is gone forever. It means sub-three, I’m gonna push it a few years out, like a comfortable-ish sub-three. It’s a marathon. It’s never gonna be comfortable. Uh, but I want my body to rebuild the right way, uh, ’cause it’s not my fitness. It’s actually, it’s my body that is the limiter.

[00:08:36] The research, it backs this up. A scientist named Esteve Lanao, I don’t wanna say that the wrong way and offend someone, he ran a randomized trial on sub-elite runners. Two groups, equal training load. One group did 80% easy and 20% hard. The other group did way more threshold work in the middle zone. The polarized group beat the threshold-heavy group on race performance.

[00:08:54] Polarized training works better for runners who aren’t pinned at world-class fitness level. That’s most of us. Think of training like seasoning food. Most of it is salt. Easy, steady, lots of it. A small amount is hot sauce. Sharp, intense, used on purpose. The middle stuff, that lukewarm gray zone sauce, whatever you wanna call it, barbecue sauce, doesn’t season anything.

[00:09:13] It just makes the whole meal taste mushy. Yes, too much barbecue sauce can be overwhelming to all you barbecue people out there. All right, here’s a quick reality check you can do, uh, either today, tomorrow, this week, et cetera, on your heart rate. So a 2:25 marathoner can race with their heart rate pinned zone four, probably zone five.

[00:09:29] Super threshold, as that’s actually called, uh, or anaerobic. Two hours, 20 minutes, whatever. Can you do that? Maybe. Probably not. I’m gonna say some people might. Let me know. Comment below if you can actually run your three or four-hour marathon. If you’re a two-hour and 30-minute marathoner, great. Uh, if you can run it in zone four, zone five, but it’s with a heart rate monitor.

[00:09:46] And don’t tell me that your, uh, Apple Watch from five years ago, your Garmin from five years ago, like even a new one, the, the actual optical, the heart rate is off. I’ve talked about heart rate a lot in a bunch of episodes. You can go get them. But you have to actually have legit done that, so comment below.

[00:10:00] The aerobic engine of an elite is doing different physiology than yours, I’m going to assume. And as you slow towards three hours, 3:30, four hours, five, six hours, the math will change. Your race becomes more aerobic the slower it gets. Going out aggressive and hoping your engine catches up is how 77% of sub-elite marathoners blow up in that power of study.

[00:10:18] And if you wanna be in the 23% that holds on, your aerobic base has to be bigger than your willpower. Okay, so what does the actual road to sub-3 look like? First, the timeline. Most plans tell you 12 to 16 weeks. That’s true if you’re already a sub-3 fit runner, you’re around three hours, and you’ve been running for at least two, three years.

[00:10:34] You’ve been doing a couple marathons, half marathon. You have, like, experience behind you. That’s absolutely fine. That’s like maintenance. You were doing the maintenance before you started doing the actual marathon training plan. It’s not true if you haven’t been running for a while, you took six months off or whatever.

[00:10:49] You’re sitting at 3:12. You’ve been doing 3:12 for the last two, three years, two, three marathons, and you just can’t break past 3:12. ‘Cause if you’re at 3:12 now, the realistic path, most likely it’s gonna be 3:08 for the next marathon. This is how I would coach you. 3:04, then 2:59 across one, two, even three years.

[00:11:09] One marathon a year. If you wanna do two marathons a year, which I’d say that’s the limit, one every four to six months, you can do that. We slowly eat one piece at a time, not the whole pie. Some will be best times, some will be flat, some will go backwards. Two steps forward, five steps back, 10 steps forward, 10 steps back.

[00:11:25] That’s how it works because life happens. You get sick, your training gets disrupted. So many things. I’m pretty sure you’re not a pro watching this, and you can devote 24 hours a day to running. I know that’s not what you wanna hear. I know YouTube wants me to tell you 12 weeks and you’re there. But the runners who actually break three hours and stay there, one, they’re probably just genetically gifted, and they could run a two-hour 40-minute marathon without training.

[00:11:46] That is not me, and that is not most people. But they’re the ones who got the order right and let the body adapt without forcing it. Yeah, some runners drop more in a single cycle. Cool. Most don’t. Now the structure. I run a 20 to 26-week build for sub-3 training, and here’s how the block breaks down. Again, you can get that training plan below, um, or early.

[00:12:03] Scan the QR code or just below in the show notes or wherever you’re reading this, just open up the episode, and I got links everywhere. So, uh, weeks one through eight of the 20 to 26-week plan, I call it foundation plus a real dose of VO2 max. Heavy easy mileage. So this is where you can do 80, 90% in zone one, zone two.

[00:12:22] This is where it works. Marathoners really need this, especially if you wanna go sub-3. Good luck trying to run this sub-3, uh, if you don’t naturally have the genetics on Two, three runs a week and you’re doing all zone four runs. So these are long runs building from 90 minutes to two and a half hours, and here’s where I differ from a lot of plans.

[00:12:39] I load up VO2 max work early. I follow Jack Daniels periodization on this, uh, not Fitzinger’s, uh, marathon plan. I have read it and I, I just doesn’t vibe with me and a lot of runners that I coach. Not saying it’s wrong, it’s just not what I do. Daniels does the high-end speed work early, then he shifts to threshold and marathon pace work.

[00:12:57] So by race day, your body has spent weeks doing work that feels like marathon pace, not work that feels like a 5K. A sample VO2 max workout from this block, five sets of three minutes at your 5K pace, uh, with two to two and a half minutes of easy jogging, walking in between, and then you progress that up to four by four.

[00:13:14] That’s the Norwegian one, so four minutes, um, at your VO2 max pace or effort or heart rate, three-minute recovery four times, and then five by four. I’ll get you up to five minutes. Or we can do 12 by 400s. There’s a lot of different VO2 max workouts I like to shift in there, but the VO2 max workouts need to get longer so you’re getting closer to, like a marathon effort.

[00:13:31] And then weeks nine through 16, this is where it’s like, all right, we’re 16 weeks out, anywhere from probably 12 to 16 weeks out. We wanna maintain that VO2 max fitness And we wanna shift the priority to threshold. So we’re gonna have one VO2 max session every 10 days or so. The big workout of the week is now threshold because that’s where we’re probably gonna be at for sub-three hours or at least below threshold for some people that are aerobically gifted or have a big aerobic engine like me.

[00:13:54] I would, for sub-three hours, I train at sub-threshold because that is my sub-three hour pace. I wouldn’t be at threshold. So threshold, if you don’t know, is anywhere probably between 10K and half marathon pace. It’s something that you can hold for about an hour. It’s quite a fast pace. I did a whole deep dive on threshold up above.

[00:14:11] Click the, uh, the video up top that link or below, um, in the show notes or description. You can learn all about threshold if you don’t understand what threshold is. Your long runs continue building. You start adding marathon pace blocks inside your long runs once you can finish two and a half hours feeling stable.

[00:14:25] And you can actually vary a lot of your long runs. They don’t have to be the same exact style long run. I did a whole thing about five long run types. They’re all different and they kinda progress in different ways. Uh, you can check out that video up above or below in the show notes or description. So a sample threshold workout starting out three sets of 10 minutes at threshold pace.

[00:14:43] Uh, you should know your pace based on a lactate threshold test, um, which is a lot of different things. Again, there’s a lotta, uh, things that you’ll do if you get that free training plan. I actually show you how to do all that. Um, and then you’ll have probably about 45 seconds to a minute and a half easy jog in between.

[00:14:58] Or if you want to do a threshold workout, you do four to five sets of one mile at threshold with even shorter rest, 30 to 60 seconds. So that’s more of like a broken tempo workout. Uh, then we’ll have you do 15 minutes at tempo, 20 minutes at tempo, 30 minutes at tempo, uh, which is threshold 40 minutes, and then it becomes one continuous run up to about 30 or 40 minutes.

[00:15:16] And then we got week 17 through 22, marathon specific. The race pace work moves to the front. It’s a main priority. Obviously, law of specificity, the theory rule of specificity. You got to do the thing to get good at the thing. You can’t do speed work to get good at a marathon. You got to do marathon pace work to get good at a marathon.

[00:15:32] So big block long runs with marathon pace inside. Threshold is maintained. Your VO2 max dropped to maintenance dose again with one short session every 10 to 14-ish days and a sample marathon specific workout, two-hour long run with the middle 60 minutes at marathon pace or a fast finish long run where the last 30 minutes hit your marathon goal pace.

[00:15:54] Since you’ve accumulated a whole bunch of fatigue in that last two hours, two and a half hours, you’re going to finish it off trying to run a marathon base and you should get fitter and it also will tell you if you can handle doing it. All right, so this is weeks, uh, 22 to 26, depending on a lot of factors.

[00:16:07] Sharpen and taper. You want to drop your volume in the last two, sometimes three weeks. Every week you basically go that three weeks out, you’re going to be 80% volume, but you keep the same marathon effort intensity. You’re still doing some VO2, but you’re dropping the whole volume so you actually will arrive fresh, but you won’t feel like you’re off and like, oh, because your body’s used to actually running a lot.

[00:16:27] If you drop it too fast too soon, you actually will freak out and things will start like feeling really weird. And then two weeks out, you’ll be at 50 to 60% volume and in that last race week, the third week, um, you’re basically cutting volume down to probably 30, 40%. Depends on a lot of factors because you’re still running the marathon at the end of the week.

[00:16:45] The three foundational runs will sit underneath all this. Easy runs, long runs, and threshold runs. So now this is the part that I think most plans and most coaches might skip. Uh, I call this the three lens system. So every workout you do should be measured against three things, not one. Pace, heart rate, and effort.

[00:17:01] Think of it like a triangle of sorts. Most plans will give you pace targets and call it a day. The smart move is checking all three. Like it’s like a data check. You go, okay, where’s that? Where’s that? Where’s that? So pace is actually your performance based on what you’re actually doing out on the road.

[00:17:17] So it’s how fast you’re going. GPS. Heart rate is how your body’s reacting to the pace. So it’s more of an internal objective measure. And then effort is how you feel. Remember, you could be going fast and it could feel easy. You could be going slow and it could feel hard. We’ve all had those days, those weeks.

[00:17:32] That is also a data point. It’s subjective. It’s what’s going on in your brain and your body physiologically. Most plans, again, they’ll give you the pace and call it a day. And the smart move is checking all three. So to know if you’re doing it right, if your easy run pace is on target but your heart rate is 15 beats above where it should be, that’s not an easy run anymore.

[00:17:49] Slow down. That’s you, again, pulling towards, you go, “Well, I have to be at this pace,” but your body’s like, “No.” You’re probably tired or under-recovered or fatigued. It’s a huge sign. Slow down or check your heart rate monitor batteries or, you know, change your heart rate monitor. It might be off. There’s a lot of factors you need to check out just to make sure.

[00:18:05] If your threshold pace is on target but your effort feels slower than marathon pace, your fitness has improved and you could probably push the pace next time. Again, threshold is probably gonna be for most people slightly faster than marathon pace. Might be closer to your half-marathon pace. Or your watch is lying to you, which again happens.

[00:18:20] We got GPS issues, heart rate issues, all these other things. So we’re gonna use the three data points to check. And it’s cool because some runners are pace people, some are heart rate people, some are effort people, and the best ones, honestly, they become all three at once. So use those three and find out which one is most reliable for you on any given day.

[00:18:35] If you want the whole 16-plus base marathon training plan mapped out, I built a sub-three marathon training plan that covers it all, the exact paces, heart rate targets, effort prompts, the prioritization that puts the right work in place. Plus you also get a free email course. It’s six five-minute emails, so you don’t have to do anything, you don’t have to go anywhere, that will help get your mind right, help you become 1% better, help you self-coach yourself and understand why I made the training plan as it is.

[00:19:01] They come one after another when you sign up. Again, all free. QR code here, link below in the show notes. And if you want to find out more about those three foundational marathon runs that I have you do in the 16 weeks leading up to the marathon, ’cause it’s very, very specific and it kind of builds on this, you can get it at the episode right here below if you’re on YouTube.

[00:19:17] Click that or the link below, uh, in the YouTube description or the show notes if you’re listening on a podcast player, et cetera. Stop pulling towards a number and start building the engine that lets your fitness push you there. Happy sub-three runnings. Peace.