Jonathan Walton ran 9.5-minute miles on Maffetone's low-heart-rate method and saw fitness gains in 12 weeks. He hit a 2:30 marathon by running 100-mile weeks, staying patient through plateaus, and avoiding rest days. He says it took him nearly five decades to find what actually works.
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It's a, it's a game of patience with Maffetone and low heart rate training. It felt, uh, that I wasn't going to get anywhere when I first started. I was probably looking the first run 9.5-minute miles, which for me was ridiculously slow, and I thought this is never going to work, but I stuck at it. And then I'd say quite quickly after 3 or 4 weeks, that 9.5 minutes started to drop to 9 minutes. And then I kept a record of it. I made a graph. I could see the graph going up slightly. And then I found after about 12 weeks, you can get to quite a decent level of fitness.
For people wanting to improve in their running, whether they want to run a marathon PR, they want to qualify for a marathon like the Boston Marathon, or they want to run the sub-3-hour marathon, What are some of the tips that you would share for them to truly improve their running?
Patience. So stick with it even though sometimes you might have a dip in your training. Say for example you're doing a marathon, you know, you run into your low heart rate. It doesn't always go up, you don't always improve. I've had, you know, it might be a couple of weeks where I've started to drop a bit, but I've stuck with it. And then it's, it's gone back up and the improvements, uh, continued. Um, consistency. So for me, it's running 100-mile weeks, week after week after week. I don't have any rest weeks. I just keep it going. Um, for someone else, you know, it might be running 40 miles a week each week, keeping that record, you know, so you can see your improvements. Don't make your goals— I know I said I wouldn't mind beating the British over-50s record— don't make your goals too difficult. If you keep your goals quite easily achievable, you know, you've got more chance of achieving them. So small steps make big improvements. Stick to a healthy sort of nutrition plan and what works for you. I'd say the main thing is, you know, trying out different things. What works for one person doesn't mean it's going to work for somebody else. So it's just trial and error as you go along, and if you find something that works for you, stick with it, and then just tweak it and try other different things. And then eventually you'll get to a point where everything just fits together. And I think that I'm more or less getting there now. It only took me nearly 50 years, but
