What these plans are honest about

The running plan

This plan gets you to the marathon start line genuinely fit, and it puts you on the sub-3 track rather than the just-finish track. That’s a real distinction. A typical first-marathon plan peaks at 45 km a week with no pace work and produces someone who survives 42 km. This one peaks at 66, trains marathon pace directly, and produces someone who races it.

What it will not do is deliver sub-3. Sub-3 is 4:16 per kilometre held for 42.2 km, and the people who run it are training 70–100 km a week for years, not one block. Your realistic finish here depends almost entirely on the week-8 10K test, and the plan tells you how to convert that into a target when you have it.

Treat this as marathon number one of three or four. The sub-3 attempt is the one at the end of that sequence, and the fastest honest route to it runs straight through this block.

The strength plan

You said three things: your strength is low relative to where you want it, you feel heavy and carry fat you’d rather not, and you want to become a strong athlete. All three are reachable. Not all three are reachable during this marathon block, and pretending otherwise is how people end up doing neither well.

Here is the actual physiology you’re up against. High-volume endurance training blunts the strength and muscle-building response to lifting — the interference effect. It scales with how much running you do, it hits the legs far harder than the upper body, and at 60–66 km a week it is not a small effect. Simultaneously, you want to be in a calorie deficit to lose fat, and a deficit is the other thing that suppresses muscle gain. Stack a peak marathon week on top of a deficit on top of hypertrophy training and you don’t get all three adaptations; you get an injury.

So the plan sequences them instead:

• Now through week 8 — running volume is still moderate. This is your window. Lift three times a week during the on-ramp, twice a week after, eat in a modest deficit, and get genuinely leaner and measurably stronger.
• Weeks 9–14 — running takes over. Strength drops to a maintenance dose that holds everything you built. Eating goes to maintenance. You are not trying to gain here; you are trying not to lose, and to arrive at the start line uninjured.
• After the race — this is where “strong athlete” actually gets built, and there’s a block sketched in After the race for it.

The good news is more interesting than the constraint. Two heavy sessions a week is not a consolation prize for a runner. Heavy strength work plus low-amplitude plyometrics improves running economy by a few percent in trained distance runners — meaning you hold the same pace at a lower oxygen cost — and it does it without adding meaningful bodyweight. That improvement is worth more to your marathon than the Tuesday session is. It is one of the few genuinely free lunches in endurance sport.

And on feeling heavy: at 71 kg, losing fat is directly a performance lever. Every kilogram costs you roughly 2–3 seconds per kilometre at marathon pace — call it a minute and a half over 42 km per kilo. Losing three or four kilos of fat between now and week 8 is worth more than any session in this plan. Adding upper-body muscle, by contrast, is performance-negative for a marathon. That’s not a reason to skip upper-body work — you want to be strong, and strong is a legitimate goal on its own terms — but it’s the reason the upper-body work here is written to maintain and slowly build rather than to grow you.