Globe article on pace
Thought this Globe and Mail article would be of interest to the P&P crew. I thought it was particularly neat to see the emphasis on the third dimension - RPE - that many of us (myself included!) start to overlook when we start to get numbers in front of us.
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I think that's a great article. So many training reports here (myself included) define a great day as going faster than the prescribed pace. In many cases, it's counter-productive in the long term. I'm finally learning tha. The article reminded me of a TI saying about doing swimming drills "99% right is 100% wrong." These guys are saying that running even 3" faster than they should is not a successful outing. Eye opening and interesting.
Granted, Simon W said "3:03 is success, 3:05 is a fail". This means he failed to hit the prescribed pace in the workout. The more important issue is: does that 2 second disparity make any difference in eventual race performance?
E.g., I almost always hit my prescribed paces for swimming right on for each workout - 50 years of swim intervals have given me a very well honed sense of pace in the pool. Today, however, the prescription was 6 x 400 (30") at 2-3 seconds/100 below RR pace. I was unsure what that actually was, so I used my IM swim range of 68-70 minutes to calculate it, giving me a goal for the 400s of 6:20-6:28. I went 6:37/21/28/24/21/17 - which is all over the map for me (usually I'm within 1-2 seconds for each interval, except the last, which ends up being as fast as I can go. But, will my wandering paces during this workout make any difference in six weeks? Even if every swim workout from now to IM CDA is like that? I doubt it.
I agree, Al. But my takeaway from the article wasn’t as much Whitfield observing the precision in pacing to the second - instead, I was interested in the point that training at pace, and pace alone, is great, but there’s more to it than just a number. Instead, training at pace PLUS being attentive to that pace and the feedback you’re getting from your body is where the real money is.
(except in the first 6’ of an IM Marathon, where GPS = God.)
I spoke with a respected Tri coach before joining EN - he wasn't anti-powermeters/GPS etc but was definitely old-school in his approach using RPE as the main training principle - coming from a power/watts focused cycling background we weren't a match but also he was vague when I queried that as a Tri newbie, I didn't have the 'skin in the game' to successfully train with RPE only, that to me is developed over many years in some cases.
Pace/Time can also be restrictive to performance - interesting discussion at the weekend on TV between Paula Radcliffe & Steve Cram (you're gonna listen!!), they were commentating on an international 10k road race over here in the UK (won by Gebrassalisse, spelling?!) - they discussed how western athletes limit themselves to the confines of pace, HR, race times etc, etc whereas the african runners just run by feel. Western runners have the ability but not the belief & confidence to hang with the Africans at the front of the pack - once they do, they have a 'breakthough' performance.
In the race Tim Don (the ITU guy) ran a PB and beat most of the western (certainly UK & EU) specialist runners. He was in a lead group containing some of the top international track runners and lived with the pace - if he'd relied on his training pace guidelines and previous times/results there's no way he would have stayed with that group and had his breakthrough.