Training for a sport and a marathon without wrecking either

Most marathon plans assume you have nothing else going on.

They give you four or five runs a week, a hard session on Thursday and a long run on Sunday. That works if running is the only thing you ask of your body. It works less well if you also play footy, rugby, soccer, basketball or netball, with training on Tuesday and Thursday and a game on Saturday.

The pattern is a familiar one. Someone signs up for a marathon, bolts a standard plan onto a full season, and by week six the legs are heavy at training, the Achilles is grumbling and the sprint feels half a step slower. Nothing in the plan was wrong. It just wasn’t written for someone with a game on the weekend.

This is a guide to fitting both together. I’ll cover what the research says about mixing the two, then how I would set up a week.

Why sport and distance running pull in different directions

Team sport is repeated sprints, sudden braking, jumps and changes of direction. Marathon training is hours of steady, low-force running. They load different parts of the system, and they compete for the same legs and the same recovery.

The classic evidence is Hickson’s 1980 study. Three groups trained for 10 weeks: strength only, endurance only, or both. VO2max rose by about 20 to 25 percent in both endurance groups, so adding strength work did not hurt the endurance gains. The combined group’s leg strength tracked the strength-only group for about seven weeks, then levelled off and declined in weeks nine and ten. Hickson concluded that training for both reduces the capacity to develop strength. It was a demanding protocol, so I would not read it as a forecast for your week.

The best summary since is a 2022 review by Schumann and colleagues, covering 43 studies. Here is what it found when aerobic training was added to strength training:

• Muscle size: no meaningful difference.
• Maximal strength: no meaningful difference.
• Explosive strength: smaller gains.
• The explosive-strength effect was clearer when both were done in the same session than when sessions were at least 3 hours apart.

For a team-sport athlete, that last point is the one that matters. Explosive strength is what you sprint, jump and change direction with.

There is a proposed biological explanation. Endurance exercise activates a signalling pathway (AMPK) that can dampen the one that drives muscle growth (mTORC1), as Keith Baar describes. It is plausible, but much of the evidence comes from cells and animals, and human studies are mixed. I treat it as a useful way to think, not settled fact.

So the picture is more reassuring than the folklore, with one caveat. Interference is smaller than people fear, and smallest for muscle size and maximal strength. Power is where the care is needed. If you care more about building muscle than power, this post covers the same evidence from the lifting side. For the triathlon version, see the earlier post on the interference effect.

Four ways I would set up the week

1. Count the sport as training

Treat a match and your team sessions as real load, not free fitness. A game is a lot of repeated sprinting and braking, which is hard on muscle and tendon in a way a steady jog isn’t. How much running you cover depends heavily on your sport and position, so I won’t put a single number on it.

For many people in this position, three runs a week is a sensible start:

• One quality run (tempo or threshold, for example).
• One easy run.
• One long run that builds gradually across the block.

Your sport already supplies a lot of fast, high-intensity work, so the running can lean towards aerobic volume. Pelaris has a guide to concurrent training with the longer version.

2. Keep the power work, and space it from the long stuff

This is the practical use of the Schumann result. Keep heavy lifting and short, fast efforts (sprints, jumps, medicine-ball work) in the week all year, and avoid putting them in the same session as a hard run. If you can, give hard sessions their own day. If you can’t, the review suggests a gap of at least 3 hours is better than back to back. Do the explosive session first, eat, and run later.

I would also keep two short strength sessions a week during the build. That is my preference rather than the result of a single trial. Heavy squats, hinges and calf work protect the tissues you are about to ask for a lot of kilometres.

3. Protect match day

Treat the match as the hardest session of the week and plan around it:

• No long or hard run in the 24 hours before the game.
• Keep the day after easy: a short run or an easy ride, not the long run.
• Swap some of your easy running for the bike or the pool. The aerobic benefit is similar and the impact is lower.

Impact is the part that catches people. Tendons and bone are generally thought to adapt more slowly than your heart and lungs, so a rapid jump in running volume on top of a season of contact is where overuse injuries tend to come from. A 2014 cohort study of novice runners found that those who increased weekly distance by more than 30 percent over two weeks had a higher rate of distance-related injuries (such as knee and shin problems) than those who increased by less than 10 percent. The result was borderline for statistical significance, so I read it as a reason to build gradually, not as a magic number. The old “10 percent rule” has its own randomised trial showing no injury benefit, so treat it as a rough guide, not a law.

4. Let the long run move around the season

This is where I would differ from a generic plan. A marathon does need long runs that build in length, and the season gets in the way. In match weeks I would cap the long run well below what you would do in a bye week, and measure it in time rather than kilometres. Put the full-length long runs on bye weekends, and in the pre-season and off-season. Fuelling matters here too, so practise it. Pelaris has a guide to fuelling during long sessions.

What a match week can look like

This is an example, not a prescription. Adjust it to your sport, your position and how you recover.

MONDAY:     Easy bike or short easy run, mobility
TUESDAY:    Team training + short heavy lower-body session (earlier in the day)
WEDNESDAY:  Quality run (tempo or threshold)
THURSDAY:   Team training, short sharp efforts, upper-body strength
FRIDAY:     Rest or 20 to 30 minutes easy
SATURDAY:   Match
SUNDAY:     Easy run or bike, capped in time. Long run moves to the bye weekend

Two small notes. First, nothing on this plan is sacred. If your legs feel flat on Wednesday after a rough game, the quality run becomes an easy one. Second, if you are building towards a marathon you will want a few weeks, perhaps in the off-season, where the long run takes priority and the sport takes a back seat.

What this means for your training

• Do not copy a generic marathon plan. Fit the running around training and games, and count the sport as load.
• Keep power work in the week. The research says explosive strength is the quality most sensitive to piling on endurance work, so protect it and space it from hard runs.
• Build the long run gradually and flexibly. Cap it in match weeks and let it grow on bye weekends.
• Fuel it. Under-eating is a common way this combination falls apart. Pelaris has guides on fuelling long sessions and protein for strength athletes.
• Take the season seriously. Pelaris has a guide on in-season training for team sports and a page on concurrent training for team athletes.

This is the situation I had in mind when building Pelaris. You tell it when your games and team sessions are, and it plans the running and strength around them instead of on top of them. If you are aiming at 42.2 kilometres, the marathon strength page shows how the pieces fit.