Chiang Mai, Thailand Frank comments: People have told me how surprised they are that I was able to do a marathon without training for it. I credit my success to mixing running and walking (in this case 4 minutes running followed by 1 minute walking, from the beginning). Jeff Galloway's book Marathon: You Can Do It! includes a testamonial from a man who never had run farther than 8 miles in his life and who on a whim signed up to run a marathon to see how far he would get before giving up. He joined up with a pace group that was using the run/walk method, and he completed the marathon in just under 5 hours. I figured if it worked for him it would work for me, and I set myself the goal of completing in just under 5 hours. I think I was spot on; I run with a Garmin GPS device and according to it the course was more than a kilometer short. If the course had been the full 42.195 kilometers, I would have finished in exactly 5 hours.
