Road to London 2009

[El Gordo]

Going back to the previous discussion, I was reading some of Tim Noakes's great Lore of Running last night. His take is that running at race pace in training is a throroughtly bad idea because a) it greatly increases your chance of injury and b) it's almost impossible to achieve anyway, because of the psychological factors present under competitive conditions that aren't there in training. No professional athlete that he's aware of tries running long at race pace, though speed and tempo runs will try to push up to that level for relatively short periods.

For anyone who doesn't know the Noakes book, I'd strongly recommend it, though it's quite daunting in its depth and sheeer size. Here's a brief blog post review I came across:

http://blog.zentience.org/2007/12/tim-no...nning.html

And here are Noakes's 15 Laws of Training:

http://www.duhac.tcdlife.ie/Training/15laws1.php