El Burro Blanco

I would recommend a mix of threshold, and marathon pace to start with. When you go to race a 5 K and start feeling like you could have gone longer but not faster, or if you see the competition pull away mid-race and start thinking, I wish this were a 10 K, then it is time to add a little bit of VO2 Max, but still for a marathoner the marathon race pace and the threshold should be the key speed workouts.

For you marathon pace should be somewhere around 6:00 pace, threshold around 5:45, and VO2 Max around 5:25. Marathon pace run should be about 10-12 miles, threshold total of 5-6, Jack Daniels recommends to break it up into at least 2 segments, V02 Max a total of 3 miles broken down into segments no longer than a mile. I tried that first, but then have adapted a variation - I do 5 miles starting at marathon pace, and shifting gears into threshold when I feel ready. For V02 I do 400s in the same volume but at a faster pace and with more rest - Jack Daniels would have called this an R-pace workout. I also finish the last 2.5 of my marathon pace runs at threshold for mental toughness and to test the depth of the perceived easiness of the marathon pace in the earlier miles.