Breaking the Wall

I like that analogy, also explains why people are happy at whatever level they are at sometimes.

Today for the first time in a while I plugged in some numbers into your race predictor from my running this year. It's interesting that although I've ran 8 Marathons this year so far (12 by year end planned) all are pretty much dead on what your calculator has. One marathon and one half marathon were 4 days after hard marathons. They both were on predictor pace. So aside from a few blow ups frequency doesn't seem to have any effect on my race times. Any thoughts on this?

Steve:

I think it means that for the ones where you did not completely blow up you were equally inhibited on all of them. We actually see this pattern on the travelling Kenyans that run many marathons in a row. They can run maybe 2:14 well rested, but due to the high frequency they run 2:18-2:22 equivalent (adjusting for the course/conditions) in the marathons that they do not win (meaning that was all they had), and it does not get worse, at least not for a couple of years.

My take on the marathon distance is that when you are fit, you can visit the past-22 mile zone and come out mostly unharmed, but it is still not ideal for your training. This is why you do not see too many elites go beyond that in one run, even though they may pack 35 miles in one day total. You get best results for marathon endurance from running about 10 miles hard when glycogen depleted as frequently as your body can handle it. For me that number right now is once a week, but if I had more time for naps, I could make it two with one being at the end of a long run, and the other at the end of a midweek medium long run.

Long story short, I think if you replaced all of the marathons excepts the ones that really matter with halves, and did that for a year, you would be running around 2:30 low, or maybe a little under on the DesNews/Ogden/Utah Valley/SLC quality course, and under 2:25 in St. George on a good day.

Another important question to answer is what kind of 800 meter speed you've got right now. That could provide some clues as to what type of training you could do to improve your marathon performance even further.

No idea about the 800 speed. I don't do much of that kind of running. Not with a timer anyways. I like all this stuff, some good things to think about. Thanks

Steve:

This might be one missing link. My thinking is that it is not possible to run a marathon faster than this computation (works for anywhere from world class to 2:40 marathon) - take your current 800 in minutes and seconds - add 12 seconds - obtain the marathon time in hours and minutes. For example, if your current 800 is 1:57, adding 12 seconds we get 2:09. So your theoretical marathon limit is 2:09:00. If you are running much slower than 2:09:00, your problem is converting the 800 speed into the marathon, you should up the mileage, do long tempos, and check out your fuel and cardio health - maybe the heart has a defect, maybe there is some disorder with the glycogen storage, etc. Maybe there is just not enough slow twitch fibers, but still even if you have some, you should be no slower than 10 minutes over the target, so in this example 2:19:00.

Now in this example of a 1:57 800 meter runner if your marathon PR is pretty close to 2:09:00, then your problem is not in the endurance factor, the endurace is more or less as good as it can get. It would be a neuromuscular, or bone structure problem. So maybe there is some kind of a nerve entrapment, or maybe a bone structure defect, maybe a defective spinal disk. In this example "defective" means "non-world-class", a guy running 800 in 1:57 has to have a fairly healthy bone structure and nerves, but something is underperforming somewhere, which is why he cannot run 1:52. I believe that even if you had a marathoner-style fast-slow twitch fiber ratio you would still be able to run 1:52 if the nerves were delivering the signal to the muscle perfectly, and there were no structural defects in the body that affect running speed.

In your situation - you used to be able to run 800 in 1:57, so the bones, the spine, and the nerves used to be in pretty good shape. It is quite likely that some of that was lost through aging. The question is how much if any, and how much of what was lost is recoverable. Step number one to find out is to go to the track, and run an all out 800. Step number two is add some 800 meter specific work and try again 6 months later.