My training lasted 8 months for the SF marathon. This is what a typical week of training looked like:

My training plan for the SF marathon was heavily inspired by Nick Bare’s sub 3 hour marathon training. In his sub 3 hour marathon YouTube series, he put his weekly mileage in the comment section, so I followed his weekly progression and weekly structure.

For speed work, I alternated between intervals and tempo workouts. One week I would do intervals, and the next week I would do a tempo run. This format was also taken from Nick Bare. I also lifted twice a week, focusing on Kneesovertoes style lifts to build strength through range of motion. The ATG split squat and RDL were some of my favorite lifts because they helped me maintain range of motion in my hip flexors and hamstrings.

My longest run was 23 miles. I wanted to get as close to 26.2 miles as I could on a beat down body so I knew what it could feel like on race day.

This is what my day to day nutrition looked like for most of my training. I’ve used MyNetDiary for over 4 years to track what I eat.

I’d do most of my morning runs fasted. There were a couple longer speed sessions during the peak of training where I had a gel before the run. For long runs and race day, I would eat 2 scoops of Skratch hydration mix and 1 Spring energy gel. This came out to around 60 grams of carbs an hour. Using this nutrition plan, I avoided hitting the wall during the race and during my long training runs.

At one point during my training, I decided to add kale to my dinner and quinoa to my rice. It was at this time that I started to experience problems with my digestion. It seemed like my stomach disagreed with every meal that I ate. My training stagnated and it felt like I was getting slower. The mileage that I had been maintaining for 6 months now started to take a tole on my body. Colitis runs in my family and affects two of my immediate family members, so I just assumed I had it too.

Around this time, I had started to look into the carnivore diet. The elimination aspect of the carnivore diet made a lot of sense to me, so I decided to eliminate foods that I believed were causing my digestive problems. On July 6th, a little over 2 weeks before the race, I decided to remove spinach, chia seeds, kale, and quinoa from my diet.

After a couple days without these foods, my HRV drastically increased, I had the most vivid dreams I could remember having, and my easy run pace decreased by almost 1 minutes and 30 seconds. After this experience, I became obsessed with sleep and digestion. I started experimenting with fasting, eating my last meal at least 2 hours before sleeping, and reducing my carbohydrate consumption by over 50%.

For miles 1 to 13, I decided to be conservative with my level of effort. Being my first marathon, my heart rate was elevated for the first 5 or so miles because of nerves. I felt like I could go faster in the beginning, but I had never ran a race like this before so I decided to be cautious and conserve my effort.

At mile 13, we hit the climb. I had heard people talk about how brutal the climb was, but had never experienced it before. It was hard, but I spend most of my long runs running up and down hills throughout the city so it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting it to be.

After the big climb around mile 13, I started to think I could pick up the pace. At mile 19, I still felt like I could pick up the pace, so I decided to go for it. For miles 1 to 19, I had maintained a pace of around 8 min/mile. For miles 20 to 26, I maintained a pace of around 7 min/mile. I clipped the last two miles at 6:29 and 6:27 and crossed the finish line in 3 hours and 23 minutes.