Theory vs Reality (Critical Thinking)
Saw this excerpt from Alan Cousens' most recent post on hacking an ATP:
"A concrete example, let’s say an experienced athlete is preparing for a competitive marathon at which they aim to run sub 3:00. Based on experience, I would expect the athlete to be able to complete a Marathon Pace run of at least 2/3 race duration at target pace by the end of the specific preparation – in other words, 17 miles in <2:00. However, in order to have ‘earned the right’ to attempt/absorb such an intensive session, I would expect the athlete to have built their easy-steady base mileage to ~100mi/wk i.e. so that the intensive session represents <15%. These general ‘preparatory’ objectives, can thus have substantial bearing on where I choose to ‘spend’ the athletes fitness even if they don’t immediately relate to the athletes weaknesses or the specific needs of the event."</p>
I really appreciate theory, but have always had an issue applying it to my reality. In this case Cousens is talking about Jack Daniels' volume breakdown for appropriate intensity. As most of you know I recently ran a sub 3:00:00 marathon and I gotta tell you I didn't run any 100 mile weeks. The biggest run volume of my _life_ was 55 miles in a week and I couldn't handle it (really). I am about 15 lbs lighter than my former self, but have never run more than 45 since...even when I am only marathon training.
My long race-specific runs, where I sat on goal Marathon Pace, never amounted to 17-18 miles at the pace itself. Instead, I ran these two particular efforts as I would on race day, 4-5 miles slower than MP by about 30 to 15 seconds per mile, the bulk at MP with a mile or two easy at the end. They were 18 and 21 miles respectively, which meant the MP sections were about 13-15 miles total.
But these weren't my hard runs, my hard runs were the 8-10 mile efforts at Half Marathon pace. For while my MP was 6:47, my HMP was 6:25, and that's a LEGIT difference. I credit these intermediate distance runs for my ability to run the full distance at my goal MP.
Part of the reason behind designing the marathon plan this way was time...after all, 100 miles at 8min per mile pace is 800 minutes or 13.33 hours of just running...and that's about 5.33 more hours than I have a week to train.
So while I appreciate the theory, following it to the letter would have ended my marathon training well before I even started...thoughts?
P
Comments
Another thread on the 3.0 forums talks on some of these issues. http://www.endurancenation.us/en_forums/showthread.php?t=9676 (sorry, can't seem to find the link button in the quick reply window).
My thoughts are to make sure you do intervals regularly and make sure you are recovering enough to hit the zones in these work outs. This will build your speed. The Z3 HMP pace stuff is great for building endurance, but there is an increased risk of injury at the harder paces, so you need to be careful. The goal should be progressive workloads as you move closer to race date.
13 hours of running, 20 hours of biking, and then swimming would make for a long week. I'd have a lot more free time after my wife threw me out of the house though
tom
OTOH- I do think that (when training solely for a marathon) it can be beneficial to do some MP running, specifically one or two long runs where you run your marathon pace for a good portion of that run (preferably at the end of the run, not at the beginning). For example, I would do a 20 mile run with my last 12-15 miles at MP. This gave me some practice holding my MP when I was tired. I wouldn't do that sort of thing while training for an Ironman though (ok- I would have done it before I joined EN- but I wouldn't do it now- heck, I won't run more that 2:30 anymore!).
Patrick knows how much stuff like this pisses me off. A few bullets:
Rich
Awesome post, Rich.
Years (actually more than a couple of decades) ago when I was one of those runners Tom Glynn mentioned I got up to 85 miles per week.
Every time I sat down I wanted to take a nap. My wife was not impressed.
I work with a few of the colleges/universities up this way as an advisor to their cross country teams on injury prevention and conditioning/cross training. It's amazing how fixed the coaches are on the magical mileage numbers as precursors to success. We're talking kids racing 8k's and running 80-90 miles a week around classes. The injury rates were nutz and it was all diffuse overtraining stuff that moves and shifts and can't be cured. It took YEARS to try and get the coaches to even hear an argument for quality over quantity. their solution was to toss the kids in the weight room.
Sounds like some EN peeps need to subscribe to other blogs and represent...just sayin'
Ar this stage of my athletic career, I'm interested in going as fast as I can - for as long (into the future) as I can. So far, I've found the balance between those two at an average of 14 hours a week, varying from 10-20 depending on the time of year. I suspect if I wanted to specialize in a single sport, the same time constraint would apply. But I'm not fast enough in any one to make it worthwhile, so spread the hours around and lower my injury and ennui risk.