Are You Ready for the L.A. Marathon?

It’s barely past 7 on a chilly Saturday morning, but the auditorium at Westminster Elementary School in Venice is overflowing with eager exercisers. They’re listening intently to Pat Connelly, official coach of the City of Los Angeles Marathon, before setting out on a 20-mile training run for the 14th annual contest on March 14.

“On marathon day,� Connelly instructs them, “wear the same outfit as you’ve trained in. Go out easy. Be conservative.�

Running a marathon isn’t easy, he reminds them.

“You’ll be cussing yourself out the last five miles, asking yourself, ‘Why am I doing this?’ �

But the pain will be short-lived.

“When I’m standing next to you, putting the medal around your neck, you’re going to say, ‘When’s the next one?’ � he promises.

The pep talk is enough to give even the most slovenly exercise dropout a bad case of marathon fever.

As the big day approaches, people who don’t even own running shoes are overheard saying to co-workers or elevator companions: “Hey, we should do the marathon.� “We could make it.�

By last week, Connelly was fielding half a dozen or more telephone calls a day from marathoners-come-lately who intended to start training but just haven’t quite put in those miles and wonder:

Is it too late?

That depends, he tells them. If you’ve done little more than think about the upcoming marathon--which this year includes the traditional 26.2-mile course, a 5K (3.1-mile) run / walk, a 25-mile bike tour and a one- and three-mile senior walk the day before--it’s probably best to shoot for the millennium marathon.

But depending on your level of training, which event you’re interested in and how quickly you want to finish, you might be a contender. Here is where you should be, training-wise, by this week, according to coaches and other experts, if you’re hoping to walk, run, jog, cycle or wheel yourself across the finish lines.

Marathon

If you’re planning to run the marathon, you should by this time be putting in at least one 20-mile run a week, says Connelly, and you should be running about 45 to 55 miles total each week. If you’ve been putting in 45 to 55 miles weekly since November or so, you’re probably in good shape for the course. Five hours is considered a “respectable� time to finish running the marathon.

If you don’t plan to run the entire marathon, you might get by on less training that that, adds Dr. Steven Simons, medical commissioner of the marathon who has competed in all 13 events.

“If you can run a half-marathon, you can probably finish a marathon if you do walking breaks, about 10 minutes every hour, all the way through the marathon,� Simons says.

If you’re planning to walk the entire marathon, you should now be walking about 2 1/2 to three hours a day, Connelly says. Adds Bob Hickey, walking coach for the L.A. Marathon: “You should be walking seven hours [at a stretch] at least once a week.� A typical finishing time for a marathon walker is six to seven hours.

Those who are entering the marathon’s wheelchair competition should be training about two hours every other day without stopping, suggests Jeremy NC Newman, a Reseda exercise physiologist and personal trainer who competed in last year’s wheelchair division. Strength training of the upper body is also important, he adds.

“Essentially, our arms are our legs,� Newman says.

Many wheelchair athletes finish the marathon in about three hours.

5K Run / Walk

If you want to run the 5K course and perhaps set a personal best record, you should now be running three or four times a week, 15 to 20 miles total, Connelly says. (A respectable time is 30 minutes.) If you’re walking the 5K just for fun, and you’re a three-day-a-week treadmill walker, going about 20 minutes each session, you should be ready, Connelly says.

Cycling

If the bike tour is your goal, you should be getting in a 10- or 15-mile ride once or twice a week by now, says Fred Matheny, a veteran cyclist who is the training and fitness editor for Bicycling magazine.

But that’s the ideal, says Matheny, and many people who don’t put in that kind of training will probably do just fine since it’s a tour, not a race. A reasonable finishing time is 2 to 2 1/2 hours.

“Most reasonably fit people can jump on a bike and go several miles,� he says.

“If you can bike about seven miles and get off feeling pretty good, you can probably complete the bike tour,� says Dr. Michael Herbst, associate director of the family practice residency programs at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center. Ideally, he adds, cyclists for the bike tour should be training for at least 10 miles at a stretch.