Training for Your First Marathon in the Netherlands

I live here, so I get asked this a lot. Is the Netherlands a kind place to run a first marathon. Flat, yes. A calendar full of races, yes. A winter that will test whether you actually like running, also yes. The two things that undo people are the wind and a plan that is hungrier than the week they have. Only one of those is yours to fix.

Pick the date before you pick the heroics

Training runs backwards from a morning. Rotterdam in April is the one I watch people aim at: fast, flat, a lot of noise, and a spring that arrives or does not. Amsterdam in October finishes in the Olympic Stadium and asks you to do the long runs through summer. Eindhoven and Enschede are real marathons if you want a smaller stage. The Zevenheuvelenloop is a tune-up, not a marathon, and a useful one if you want a hard effort on the way in without pretending it replaces the long run.

A spring race means the base is built in the dark and the wet. An autumn race means long Sundays when everyone else is at the water. Both work. Pick the season you will still go out in when the week is ordinary.

If you can already run about 10 km without it becoming an event, 16 to 18 weeks is a realistic first-marathon build. Closer to zero, I would put a 5K and a 10K in front of it. There is no prize for skipping the step, and a rushed volume jump is the mistake I keep seeing in first-time builds around here. That is coaching, not a statistic. The longer version of the plan itself is the first marathon training plan.

The two things I would not trade away

Most of the running should be easy enough to talk through. First-timers run the easy days too hard because the country is flat and the watch looks polite, then they arrive at the one faster session already spent. Easy means a conversation, including on the way back.

The long run grows in steps, not leaps, and every few weeks it gets shorter on purpose so the work lands. Jack Daniels does not want one run to eat more than about 25 to 30% of the week if you are around 40 miles a week or less, and he keeps easy outings inside about 30 to 150 minutes. A Sunday that is half the week will not make you ready. It will make Wednesday disappear. (Daniels, 2013)

I build toward the high 20s, and only toward 30 to 32 km if the week can carry it and you are not already out near three hours. You do not need to cover 42.2 in training. Tempos, the odd interval, a late piece at marathon effort: they support those two habits. They do not replace them. How the rest of the kilometres grow is in building weekly mileage.

Once the long run pushes past about 75 minutes, practise fuel. Jeukendrup's review scales carbohydrate with duration: around 30 grams an hour for 1 to 2 hours, toward 60 grams an hour when it runs longer. Same drink or gel you will use on race morning. The polder does not have a cafe at kilometre 24. (Jeukendrup, 2014, Sports Medicine)

The wind is the hill

A 20 km long run into a hard westerly is not the same run as the same loop on a still morning. I have watched more Rotterdam builds get noisy about a slow Sunday than about the actual plan. Run by effort. Do not panic when the split is worse and the talk test still holds. A fixed sheet that assumed a calm day will call that a failure. It was the weather.

Runapt turns the race, a VDOT from something you have already run, and the days you can train into a week-by-week plan with paces, then moves the week when the weather or a missed run says the original shape is a lie. Routes come from where you are, so you are not drawing a 30 km loop on the kitchen table the night before.

Build the first marathon week free and look at the paces and the long-run build before you decide the date was the easy part.

Sources

Daniels, J. (2013). Daniels' Running Formula (3rd ed.). Human Kinetics.

Jeukendrup, A. (2014). A step towards personalized sports nutrition: carbohydrate intake during exercise. Sports Medicine, 44(Suppl 1), 25–33. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-014-0148-z