20 weeks to St.George...what next?

[Carrie Heaton]

I'm going to qualify for Boston this year, (a positive attitude helps, right?)  I'm using St. George to do it.  Any suggestions and/or training plans that you can give me would be wonderful.  I did a week of three miles a day at a 11 minute mile pace.  What should I do for week two and beyond? 

[Jon Allen]

Carrie

I don't think there are really any magic tricks for you.  The simple answer is you need to keep running every day and gradually increase your mileage.  Higher, consistent mileage will help you improve your marathon time, perhaps drastically.  Sasha often tells people to increase so they are running at least 6 miles a day.  Beyond that, you should start making some days harder/longer and some days easy (i.e. 3-6 miles very slow).  Doing long runs is also very important, as well.  I would suggest something like starting a long run of 6 miles and building up 2 miles every other week or so, up to 18-22 miles.  With a 4 hour time goal, some sort of run/walk cycle in your marathon and long runs may be beneficial, as well.  You can pick and choose from my suggestions, but consistently higher mileage and longer runs will help you the most.

My two cents (about what it is worth).

[Michelle Lowry]

I would start to increase your daily mileage at most one mile a day, but start doing long runs once a week (perhaps start with a long run of 6 miles this week).  Once you get to 6 miles a day, I would start making three out of your six running days longer (so eventually you'd have a week of something like 6-8-6-8-6-15) and add a tempo run of two miles (pace it at your current marathon - half marathon pace) inside one of your longer weekday runs. Gradually increase the distance of that weekday tempo.  Your pace of your easy runs and your tempos will drop as you are consistent in your running and as you increase your weekly mileage, and you shouldn't focus on pace except for on the tempo days.  What is a BQ time for you?  One other thing, I only see 5 blog posts for you in the month of April, if you blog every run, you are sure to run more often.

Best of luck to you!

[Josse]

I agree with Jon.  I am assuming that your qualifing time is 3:40 which would be about an 8:20 pace.  I would do what Jon said and build you mileage up and run everyday.  Then around July start doing marathon pace runs.  This will be a run once a week where you practice you marathon pace.  Start out doing a warmup and then do 2-3 miles at marathon pace.  Work your way up to doing 10-13 miles of this before the marathon.  With consistant training you will do great.

[Sasha Pachev]

Carrie:

Marathon takes a lot of preparation, and disasters are much more common than miracles. With consistent training overtime, however, what would have been a miracle now becomes a realistically anticipated breakthrough, and the circumstances that would have caused a disaster in the past make you run only a couple of minutes slower than you otherwise would have. Unlike in the world of school classrooms or office jobs in the world of running we live the law of the farm. We do not get to set deadlines, rather we get to reap what we have sown.

With the above in mind, I would suggest that you adjust your expectations for St. George from being a miracle breakthrough race to just a race where you will be happy to take what your training has earned you. As you continue the process you will eventually run your miracle race, but it will not necessarily happen on your time table. Let it happen when it does and keep on training in the meantime.