2008 - Autumn

[El Gordo]

EG, excellent news on your latest long run, and your progress towards Boston. I'll watch your FIRST progress with interest. I'm all for quality work in the shorter sessions, but it's the set-pace long runs that worry me...

The pace goals don't seem over-intimidating to me, though naturally it depends what your goals are. I'm hoping to make a real improvement this time, but even so, adding a minute (say) onto the proposed race pace seems to give me very achievable training long run targets. Perhaps more important, I'm probably more disobedient than you, Dan. If my long runs fall short of the pace target by 15, 30, or even more, seconds a mile, I'm not going to beat myself about it. I take those targets with a small pinch of salt, and tend to translate them into more palatable imstructions. So if they're telling me to aim for race pace + 30/60 seconds, I just read that as "try not to dawdle too much". Hal Higdon's plans I think suggest race pace + 1 or 1.5 minutes, so there's not a huge difference. In my case, far far more important is just to do the long runs. I've undertrained for every one of my previous marathons. Long runs have been frequently missed, or I've ended up walking for the last quarter of them because of a hangover. I can't help feeling that just to get the long runs done, and taking them a bit more seriously, will do me a lot of good.

More challenging for me are the interval and tempo sessions. It's something I've never really done before, but it's the main reason that I want to try out this plan. I've had to wake up to the fact that I have only one pace: slow. I never seem to vary it, regardless of how long a training run is. Actually, I have two speeds: training and race. The latter is faster, but it still doesn't vary regardless of the length of the race.

This has never bothered me before, partly because I've never noticed it, but mainly because I've rarely been interested in making big improvements. Or rarely thought they were possible. The only way to do something about this is to try to force the pace in training. I just need to be careful. The one time I tried this, I ended up injuring myself. For that reason, I'm thinking of going for the interval sessions in the 'first time marathoner' schedule, and the long runs of the improver schedule. They seem much less hostile, and more do-able.

Re the Oprah article: I didn't read the comments, but surely the main theme of the article, that fun runners are making elite marathoning less competitive, is spurious? The article seems rather sensationalist, mixing statistics about elites and fun runners in the same sentence.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I'm too impressionable. I felt quite bruised by it, until I read some of the comments, and had a rethink. A sentiment expressed by many of the respondents is along the lines of "you're just feeling sore because you're no longer doing something that sets you apart from the man in the street". I think that's at the heart of the writer's resentment.