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Running slow
Each of these approaches can help you run better.
Base training aims to improve your aerobic threshold. This improves your overall fitness and running economy, and this will in turn improve your endurance and ultimately your potential for speed. However, this is training to be carried out during a period when you are not specifically preparing for a marathon.
Speedwork aims to improve your running efficiency. Running fast helps to improve your running gait and stride. This training may also help your breathing capacity (VO2). This type of training is good for 10k and 5k speed (allegedly). Nevertheless, the improvements in running efficiency can work through to benefit all of your running.
Tempo runs (those with a sustained burst of moderate speed) will make you more comfortable when racing, by improving your lactate threshold. This really helps your half marathon times, and will also build into your marathon performance.
To some extent, long runs mimic the effects of base training, and by doing them slowly you can not only reduce the negative effects of long distance on your body, but also accustom your body to running for a very long time, something it will have to do on marathon day. You may find, like Paula, that marathon training improves your performance at shorter distances as well, but maybe this improvement comes from the increased tolerance to harder training which ultimately goes with this particular territory.
Your comfortable training pace is 8:30, the same as your Half Marathon race pace. This suggests that your likely marathon pace is probably somewhere in the 9:00 to 9:30 range, provided you are adequately trained for the event. This means that you have to be trained for running very long distances.
As Iceman says, the period of marathon training is all about building endurance. Long runs are everything, and you will feel like all your runs are slow during this period, in part because you are fitter and it gets easier. You need discipline not to train too fast all of the time. Instead you can do some limited speedwork, especially in the early weeks of a marathon training programme, and maybe add occasional tempo runs and a half marathon race up to about four or six weeks out. Your half marathon time will likely improve, too.
But whilst the other stuff helps your general fitness and confidence, and helps to keep you sane, endurance is absolutely 100% of running the marathon. The simple problem is that the race only really begins at 20 miles.
Perhaps the biggest, and easiest, mistake to make in a marathon is to train just a bit too fast, and then to run an ambitious pace, too near to your half marathon pace. It will feel just fantastic for 20 miles, and you'll think you can keep it up all the way. But you'll probably end up walking quite a bit of those last 6.2. And it will hurt. A lot. Iceman puts it perfectly when he says that those fast first 20 miles mean little when you lose more time, possibly much more time, than if you'd started off just 15 seconds per mile slower in the first place.
It's very tempting to run just that 3% faster. It's easy. But trust me, it's a very long way from the Tower of London to the Mall, or from Southside Chicago to Downtown when you're crawling....
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