From a 300kg Deadlift to a 3:40 Marathon: What I Learned Adding Running to Powerlifting

February 16, 2026

I did powerlifting for years. Competed in multiple meets, eventually hit a 300kg deadlift. It was fun, I liked getting stronger, and that was basically my entire training identity.

Then my daughter was born, and for whatever reason I decided that was the right time to add running to the mix. Probably some form of proving to myself that I can still pursue athletic goals with proper time management and very little sleep. In hindsight, the timing was questionable. But here we are.

I wanted to share what actually happened — the numbers, the trade-offs, and the stuff I wish someone had told me before I started.

The strength drop

Let's get this out of the way: yes, you will lose strength. Every lifter who considers adding serious running has that concern, and it's not wrong. But it's also not as bad as you'd expect.

Before I started running seriously, my numbers looked like this:

Squat: 210kg
Bench: 150kg
Deadlift: 300kg

After committing to hybrid training with a running focus, here's where I landed:

Squat: 150kg (took the biggest hit — was never my strongest lift, and running volume crushed it)
Bench: 130kg (mostly weight loss and some shoulder issues I had to work through)
Deadlift: ~200kg (switched from sumo to conventional because my knees weren't happy with running volume plus sumo stance — could probably hit heavier with a dedicated sumo block)

On the running side:

1:39 half marathon (second half marathon ever)
3:40 marathon (first full marathon)

Are those powerlifting numbers impressive anymore? Not really. But a 200kg conventional deadlift while running 70km weeks and sleeping 5 hours a night with a newborn? I'll take that.

Curious how you'd stack up? Check your own Hybrid Athlete Score — it's free and takes 30 seconds.

What actually changed in my training

The biggest shift was accepting that strength training had to take a back seat.

My training split settled into something like this:

Strength: 2 sessions per week. Lower body focused, alternating between squat and deadlift days, plus one heavy upper pressing movement. Just the big compounds, get in and get out.

Upper body volume: Daily push-ups and pull-ups. We have a pull-up bar at work with a yearly challenge, which helps with consistency.

Running: 4 sessions per week. Two easy runs, one tempo or interval session, one long run. Peaked around 70km per week during marathon prep.

Schedule: Everything starts at 6 AM so I'm at work early and home early to spend time with my daughter.

The things nobody tells you about running as a heavy lifter

When I started running, I weighed significantly more than your average runner. And your body lets you know.

Shins, feet, ankles — everything that doesn't get loaded in that specific repetitive way during strength training suddenly had a lot of opinions. The first few months were rough. There were runs where my feet hurt from the first step and didn't stop until I was done.

Here's the thing: your cardiovascular system adapts way faster than your joints and connective tissue. My heart and lungs were ready for more volume months before my shins and ankles were. I kept wanting to add more because aerobically I could handle it, but everything below the knees disagreed.

What helped was simply being patient. Slow progression, manageable volume increases, trusting that the body would adapt. No specific rehab exercises, no fancy recovery tools. Just time.

The other thing: easy runs must be genuinely easy. In my first marathon block, I ran too many sessions at a "medium" effort because it felt too slow. Coming from powerlifting, where every set should feel somewhat hard, deliberately keeping intensity low felt wrong.

I paid for that on race day.

My first marathon: a lesson in pacing

My half marathon time of 1:39 suggested I could probably push for sub-3:20 in the marathon. Maybe even faster if everything went right.

I went out too aggressively.

The first 30km felt controlled. Then at around the 3-hour mark, my legs and hips just stopped cooperating. It wasn't the typical "wall" from glycogen depletion. It was muscular — hip flexors, quads, everything from the waist down had had enough of absorbing impact at that body weight for that long.

The last 12km were survival mode. Finished in 3:40, which isn't bad for a first marathon, but the gap between how the first half felt and how the last quarter felt was rough.

What I took from it: pacing calculators based on half marathon times probably overestimate marathon performance for heavier runners. The accumulated impact over 42km hits different when you're carrying 85-90kg versus 65kg. The aerobic engine might be there, but the structural tolerance isn't — at least not yet.

The interference effect is real, but manageable

If you spend any time reading about concurrent training (combining strength and endurance), you'll come across the interference effect. The basic idea is that the adaptations your body makes for strength and the adaptations it makes for endurance partially cancel each other out.

This is real. Heavy squats tank your running for 48-72 hours. High running volume impacts deadlift recovery. You cannot peak at both simultaneously.

But you don't need to. Two strength sessions per week was enough to maintain solid numbers. And four running sessions per week was enough for a 1:39 half and a 3:40 full in my first serious year.

The key was sequencing. Not doing heavy squats the day before a long run. Not programming intervals the day after deadlifts. When you're fitting 6 sessions into a week around a newborn's schedule, the planning matters more than you'd think.

This is actually the problem I kept running into — literally no app or tool handled both sides. My running app didn't know I squatted heavy yesterday. My lifting tracker didn't care about tomorrow's long run. I was constantly guessing whether today's session was going to ruin tomorrow's.

I got tired of that, so I built the thing I wished existed. That turned into HybridX. I use it daily for my own training, and it's still very much a work in progress — but it beats the spreadsheet and guesswork approach I was using before.

The unexpected upside

I look better now than I did as a heavier powerlifter. Lower body fat, still reasonable muscle mass. My physique isn't as "big" but it's more athletic.

The mental shift was harder than the physical one. Watching my squat drop 60kg wasn't fun. But reframing it as "I can squat 150kg AND run a half marathon in 1:39" made it feel less like losing something.

Upper body held up well with minimal direct work. It's the legs that take the hit — they're always a bit tired, and you just learn to operate in that state.

Sleep deprivation: the actual limiting factor

I've buried this deep in the post but it's probably the single biggest factor. My daughter didn't sleep through the night for months. Training on 5 hours of broken sleep changes everything.

Recovery is worse. RPE on everything feels higher. Easy runs feel harder. Motivation to get up at 5:45 disappears regularly.

No magic solution. I just accepted suboptimal recovery and adjusted expectations rather than volume. Some weeks I hit every session, some weeks I didn't.

Once sleep improves — whenever that happens — I expect everything to get noticeably better.

What's next

Vienna Marathon, sub-3:30 target. After what happened in the first one, I'm going conservative with pacing. I'd rather finish strong than blow up again.

Strength stays at maintenance for now. Once the marathon is done, I might do a strength-focused block and see how fast the numbers come back.

If you're a lifter thinking about adding running

Start slower than you think. Your cardio adapts fast. Your joints need months. Respect that gap.

Two strength sessions per week is enough to maintain. You won't grow, but the foundation holds better than you'd fear. Big compounds only.

Easy runs must be easy. If you're coming from strength sports where intensity matters, this is the hardest adjustment.

Accept the trade-off. You can't peak at both. But you can be reasonably strong and reasonably fast.

Sequencing matters. Don't stack heavy lower body work next to hard running sessions. This is exactly the kind of thing a unified training plan handles automatically — your running schedule knows about yesterday's squats.

Give it a year. Not just the fitness — the body adaptation, the mindset shift, learning to be okay with lower numbers. It takes time.

I'm Christian, founder of HybridX — a training app for athletes who do both strength and endurance. I built it because I needed it and nothing else existed. You can track workouts for free, and there's a free trial for the AI plan generation if you want to test it.