PSA: Want to be Faster in 2014? Don't Race a Marathon this Fall / Winter!!
Just like the swallows returning to Capistrano, I've seen my first Season Planning Survey for 2014 races with a fall '13 / winter '14 marathon on schedule.
So it's obvious that as many of you end your A-race 2013 season in the next few months you'll start planning your 2014 seasons, and it's my hope that we can stop you from racing a marathon, or at least racing a marathon for the wrong reasons.
Please go here and read our thoughts on Marathons and Triathlon Training
- Thoughts or questions about the above article? Post them to this.
- Got any "I shoulda listened to RnP re running a marathon" stories? Post them to this thread also.
Bottomline: our combination of OutSeason, Bike/Run Focus, Get Faster plans are our best tools for making you much, much faster. My intent here is to head you off from registering for a marathon so we can have a discussion about making you faster using those tools vs how do we compromise / adapt those tools to accommodate your marathon.
Comments
2012 OS starting in November
2013 IM in mid May (Lanzarote?)
2013 End May/early June recovery
2013 Marathon end September (Berlin?)
2013 October downtime/month off
2013 OS starting in November
2014 IM in the summer
Just being argumentative here! I can't see how you can qualify for Boston, run the Boston marathon and do a summer IM without compromising something.
I do agree with the no marathon dogma, it is right for triathletes. No question. To build and recover right is too much.
Personally I have some unfinished business, and want to check this sub-3 box this December. Then be done with marathons and focus on triathlons for the near future.
Helen, yes, that works from a training/recovery standpoint. However, what people often fail to consider is the mental cost of bouncing from IM season (or HIM) to a marathon to the OS to an IM season, etc. So in addition to people observing lots of I coulda shoulda woulda been faster for my IM if I had not trained for and raced a marathon, we also have people relating periods of mental burnout.
If you ran all of the hundreds and hundreds a season plan screencasts I've done through an NSA data filter, staffed by Snowden, I'm sure, what you hear over and over again are my points about the mental cost of a race schedule and our focus on reducing this mental cost as much as we can.
Brandon, understood, and I state in the blog post that we get that it doesn't always mean tri tri tri. What I'm trying to head off, and I'm sure you understand this is:
Our intent here is to give these folks our perspective and experience and hopefully catch them before they make a decision that, we feel, doesn't support their goals like they think it will.