Ooooh me legs !!! Toral 2005

[Riazor Blue]

Firstly, thanks everyone for the congatulations. Next, the report, of which the race itself is only a part. It goes on a bit (just like me really), appologies in advance.

I don’t know where to start with this tale though, because the marathon itself was the end of the story, not the beginning. What if I start from the beginning of last week? I know that I should have posted last week, but I hadn’t clearly worked out what I had wanted to write. Perhaps the story of doubts, indescision, funny twinges, planning and replanning of strategies would have made for interesting reading. More interesting than my usual efforts. The truth was though, that I needed to work through these things myself.
Physically, everything had gone well in preparation, I had missed a few training runs, but only a couple of the key sessions. As it worked out during the twelve weeks of my plan, I only managed to run twice on a Monday, but hey, I’m a veteran, so I have to take age into account. The plan for last week, in terms of training should have seen runs on Tuesday through to Friday, but a little judicious pruning cut this back to 5 x 1600m on Tuesday and a fairly quick 5 kilometers on Thursday. A little twinge in the left achilles left me thinking that less is more, as they say. Physically, I was in good shape. Since the Betanzos half marathon I had put in the 37km long run, and more importantly, I had recovered well from it. I had run a good 20 km plus a few interval sessions, and a couple of tempo runs.
Betanzos had given me confidence, I could see that the training was working. How I felt after the 37 km added to that confidence and then that little voice in the back of the mind started to tell me that perhaps three hours could be a realistic target. I’m glad I wrote about that on here, because what you guys wrote made me sit down and really think about what I wanted to achieve with this marathon. More importantly, and more difficult to recognize; what was achievable. I looked at many equivalence tables to guide me, back issues of Corricolari and Runner’s World aswell. There seemed to be two camps; the equivalence tables said around 3h05 whilst the magazines were more conservative, around 3h20.
So what did I want to achieve running in Toral? Well, my marathon time was quite slow in comparison to shorter races. Of course part of this is due to the fact that I haven’t run one for a year. In reality, the time isn’t so important, but so many people ask in the shop. So what else? OK, a sub three hour marathon would be nice, and I wouldn’t mind a 2h… time, but I had decided that it was not possible. Another target which would be nice, and achievable, would be the ‘good for age’ time for the London Marathon, which for me is (or was) 3h15. Running in London would definately please my family. Sub 3h15 works out at 4’37” per kilometer.
4’37” per kilometer, hmm, I thought I could do better than that. As I said, I had looked through old magazines at marathon plans, advice etc and a number that kept returning was 17 seconds. Seventeen seconds per kilometer difference between half marathon pace and marathon pace. For me then, that would be 4’25” per kilometer, which would work out at 3h06 more or less. What else? There seemed to be a consensus that one should pass the half marathon mark around six or seven minutes slower than in the test half marathon. For me then this would be around 1h34, so with even splits I could be looking at 3h08, which would be 4’27” per kilometer. I looked at those times and thought them achievable. So there I was with objectives: firstly, if everthing went perfectly, I could aim for between 3h06 and 3h08, if things weren’t so good 3h15. I had also thought about pacing myself according to heart rate, but in the end I discounted this because with all this training my legs could not keep pace with my improving fitness, so, for example, if twelve weeks ago I could run 10km @ 4’40” at an average of 165 bpm, last week I could run the same at 155 bpm. With the extra fitness I could not decide at what heart rate to run.