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How should marathon pace feel?

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“So, what exactly should marathon pace feel like?”

This was recently a question that my athlete, Lisa, posed to me. I sat there and thought about it, but ultimately I only came to the conclusion that this was a great question. My answer is, (insert drum roll) that it depends. Unfortunately, a question like this has a ton of different answers  with caveats. However, I do think it deserves a look into because one of the items I always stress is to learn how paces feel.

While thinking about it, I think there’s four major areas we need to look at.

  1. Your strengths as a runner
  2. The timing and length of the workout
  3. How big of a jump you are trying to make
  4. What your goal pace is

Strengths as a runner:

Your strengths as a runner will initially play a role in how marathon pace should feel. We have done a few blogs about finding these strengths and how to “score” yourself. We actually start the Hansons First Marathon book on these premises. I won’t dive into those here, but the bottom line is, the makeup you possess as a runner will dictate how marathon pace feels. If you are a speed demon who loves ripping up the track every Tuesday evening with the local run club, then there’s a chance you dread the Thursday tempo. It seems to be harder to run 6 miles at a pace that’s significantly slower than what you were whipping around the track at a couple days earlier. On the other hand, if you are a person who loves going out and putting in miles, marathon pace is probably your place of refuge.

Timing  and length of the workout.

This could mean the timing of the segment, but also the time of year. For instance, people training for an October marathon will begin their training in early to mid June. If they took some down time and then jump into training, they aren’t very acclimated. This certainly isn’t going to make marathon pace feel very easy. Luckily, you aren’t running very long tempos at that point, but it can certainly be a dream killer.

On that note, the first marathon workouts may be tough because it’s pace and duration . We’ll talk about those making big jumps in a second, but for now we are just talking about the distance at that new pace. Initially, that workout might feel like a lung burner because it’s currently out of the realm of possibility to run that pace for an entire marathon. In some cases, it might actually be more like half marathon pace. However, as time goes on, your fitness will improve. Ideally that pace feels more an more comfortable. Your effort is harder because of the increasing distance of the workout and the pace isn’t your primary issue anymore.

How big of a jump are you trying to make?

Along the lines we have already talked about, the amount of improvement you are trying to make will play a big part in how pace feels. If you have someone whose running their 15th marathon, they probably aren’t swinging for the 30 min PR fences. They are just trying to eek out that 0.5% to 2% improvement or maintain that BQ status. On the other hand, if you have a relative newbie whose just now learning about structured training, they might be trying to hit that walk off homer. For these folks, they are talking about doing tempo runs at what they might have been doing speed workouts at last year. This is going to be a major effort, especially early on for them. Mind you, I am not saying they should or shouldn’t be going for it, rather just pointing out that they might be in the “what have I gotten myself into” camp for a while.

What is your goal pace?

Before I get any emails about being elitist, let me be clear, I am not downplaying anyone’s ability. I am simply talking about training. With that disclaimer out of the way, slower runners will have a harder time differentiating tempo runs from easy days, especially early on. What I have noticed is that the grey area for prescribing paces occurs about that 4 hour goal mark. This is where things get a little blurry. At this point, runners will sometimes be running their easy runs faster than what their goal marathon pace is. Why? For most folks, their general endurance is going to be their limiting factor. In essence, can they just cover the 26.2 miles and keep it together? So, I don’t necessarily worry about these folks as much because if I can just keep them healthy and putting consistent miles in, then they will run pretty well. THEN, we can start really laying out some goals for them.

But Luke, you never really answered the question- how does MP feel?

You’re right, but what I wanted you to think about was all the factors involved and how you personally react to these variables I discussed. This whole layout was for you to think about what you go through on the tempo days. However, I’ve training with the Hanson philosophy since 2004 and I will tell you this. When I was at my highest fitness levels, the 10 mile tempo was always a big workout, but when I ran it, I always finished feeling that I could have went farther.  Not 16 miles, but I felt like I could have gone another 3-4 miles at that pace. I could talk to my teammates in short sentences. I was breathing hard, but I wasn’t labored. When I got to that point, I knew I was ready to go.  If I could do that in the middle of a 120-140 mile week, I knew I could run that on fresh legs for a really long time. For you, that might mean feeling like you could go another 2-3 miles after a 10 mile tempo in the middle of your peak weeks. If you get to those 8-10 mile tempos and they are essentially races, then you are probably in over your head a little bit and need to evaluate goal pace, recovery, overall volume, etc.

Bottom line is that if you struggle early, don’t panic. But if by the time you’ve reached 6-8 weeks to go and you just can’t find your rhythm, then don’t be scared to re evaluate. I think this is especially true for the folks trying to make the big jumps.

An athlete’s question: Hill repeats or hilly run?

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I really like these and maybe we should make it a regular part of blogging! I got another great question from Jill, an athlete we wrote a custom schedule for. She emailed me a very simple question that doesn’t have a simple answer: “What is better hill repeats or a hilly run at marathon pace?” Great question! The answer is… Both! Thanks for reading, have a great day!

Just kidding! The answer is both, but for other reasons. Let’s first look at hill repeats. Let’s ask ourselves what the main purpose is of hill repeats is? What is the benefit? Well, we know they’ll make us stronger, so let’s knock that one out of the way. One big aspect of hills is that it is a great form of speed work, or working at close to VO2max effort (not pace). With shorter, but faster hill repeats we are working very close to our VO2max if we are hammering hard up a 1-4 minute hill a few times in a row. You can tell just by how hard that you are breathing that you are working hard, right? With that, we are working on some neuromuscular components as well. With the intense effort, we begin recruiting all of our muscle fiber types to help out. This eventually “opens” up channels to some fast and intermediate twitch muscle fibers that you didn’t even know you had. At the end of the day, think of hill repeats as helping more with overall strength and top end components- lactate buffering, VO2 max, and things like that.

A final note about short hill repeats is that I will use them as gateways towards other workouts. With Boston Marathon people, what I will do is start out with UP hill repeats and a slow recovery back down the hill. Eccentric contractions are crucial for hill running, but they beat you up pretty good in the process. Over time, we’ll adjust and hard UP hill repeats, recover, and then DOWN hill repeats to prepare their legs for the thrashing they’ll get over 26 miles.

What about a tempo run on a hilly course? You’ll get a lot of benefit from theses, both physiologically and structurally. You’ll build your strength obviously, but it’s more like lifting 2 sets of 20 reps of medium weight, compared to like lifting 2 sets of 8 reps as hard as you can with hill repeats. You’ll still get muscle fiber recruitment too, simply because you’ll fatigue your muscles with a fairly intense effort over 30-70 or 80 minutes. For marathoners, that’s great because it’s very race like. These are all great benefits, but to me, one thing we can’t overlook is their eventual impact on our ability to judge effort and pace. For instance, right now, many people have awoken from treadmill hibernation, where they’ve simply set the pace on the hamster wheel and zoned out to their latest podcast of Dateline, or whatever you listen too. Now, they go outside and after letting their eyes recover from the new found sun, realize that there are hills and turns and beautiful scenery. I’m partly kidding, but you know what I mean- we forget and have forgot if we haven’t run in situations where we need to say, “man my pace is slow, but it certainly feels like a hard effort.” I reference back to folks training for Boston. There’s only small section of that course where it’s really flat. It seems like that you are either going up or down most of the time. This means splits will be fast and splits will be slow. It may be hard to find a rhythm. If you’ve practiced pace and effort on hills, then you’ll have more confidence and trust yourself that the effort is there and in the end, the pace will average out.

So there you have it, they are both important but for different reasons. Both have a place in training and can be utilized to your benefit.

– Luke

 

A reader’s question

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I get a lot of emails and do my best to answer as many as I can. Luckily for all of us, our readers ask great questions that allow me to write a quick blog post that can help out many runners at once! This morning, I woke up, made coffee and sat down to a full inbox. One reader, Rico, made a comment on one of our blog posts. It was in a spot that will probably get buried, so I thought it made a great excuse to write a quick note here.

Ok, so his question is basically this- “I’m 14 weeks into the marathon schedule and have my last 16 miler this weekend. I also have the Gate River 15k. Not sure what to do?” In this case, I know the 15k is on Saturday morning and if he’s kept the schedule, the 16 miler is on Sunday. Oh snap! For Rico, the 15k is a good race distance because it’s a good distance for a tempo replacement. However, the long run is super important. That is quite the predicament…

There’s a couple of ways to approach to approach this. Let’s explore our options.

  • Don’t do the race. It’s as simple as that. Just stick to the schedule. I know that’s not you wanted to hear, but you have to consider it. How important is the marathon? How important is this race? Answering that question can make your decision for you.
  • Run the race as a tempo and not do the long run. This is not desirable either because you do three 16 mile long runs while doing a tempo of some distance every week. At this point, what’s going to give you a better training benefit?
  • Do the race as part of the long run. In this case, the race is 9.3 miles (15k), so there is about 7 miles to account for. I think if you are going to run the race, then this is the least evil of the options. I would approach by warming up 3-5 miles and cooling down 2-4 miles to achieve the 16 miles.
    • The caveat here is that you should run easy on Thursday, Friday, and Sunday at mileage high enough to keep the overall total close to what it would have been without adjustments.

These are the three most viable options. At the end of the day, decide what is most important to you, what your training needs the most, and how you are going to be able to move forward with the schedule. Hope this helps!

 

-Luke

Marathon Tempo Runs

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Marathon Tempo

There are a lot of different definitions for tempo runs. For marathon training, a tempo run is a run at goal marathon pace.

There is not a lot to adjust for most marathoners. For most people I would continue to build from 5 miles to 10 miles at pace for their progression. However, there are a few tweaks that could be made for certain populations.

Under 30 miles/week:

Introduce tempo’s early in the segment.

Start with 3 miles and build to 4 miles after a few weeks. From there, continue with normal progression of 5-10 miles of tempo.

High Mileage: 80+ miles/week

With you folks, you can consider starting at 6 mile tempos and progressing to 10 mile tempos, especially if your training block is in the 12-14 weeks range.

There is the possibility of running a longer tempo run, say 11-12 miles. However, I would not do them in consecutive weeks like the other tempo run distances. These are something that can be done once every few weeks. I don’t prescribe a ton of these because of the time factor. Many people are already barely squeezing in a 10 mile tempo (plus warm up/and cool down). One option is to do a longer tempo in place of a Sunday run. It can be on a weekend when you aren’t doing a true long run. This then makes your Thursday and open day. I would do a medium long run in this case. Something in the range of 14 miles (at least 90 minutes) and then do your long tempo on Saturday or Sunday.

At this mileage, you can also consider doing a cutdown. This is best suited early in a training block when just starting to do some harder workouts and/or later in a segment if you are truly fatigued but still need a solid workout to get in. For instance, the Hanson’s-Brooks Distance Project do a 10 mile cutdown. I’ll give you the guys’ version because I know the paces off the top of my head. Here’s what the mile splits look like in a traditional cutdown: 6:00, 6:00, 5:50, 5:50, 5:40, 5:30, 5:20, 5:10, 5:00, 4:50 (Sometimes we’ll stay at 5:00). From a pace standpoint, we are starting at about 40-50 seconds slower than marathon pace and getting down to about half marathon pace with these runs. I do like these workouts because they start out pretty easy, and then it sneaks up on you and all of a sudden it’s hard the last few miles. This is a great representation of the marathon. These can be 6-10 miles in length. The end pace should always be about the same, but the beginning pace can become faster as the length of the cutdown shortens.

Implementing the cutdown is key. I like these as a first workout back from a running break. They are also good to do as a last workout before a race (say a tune up race during marathon training), and if you are really on the verge of going over that training edge, but don’t want complete rest.

 

The tempo fartlek: This something that I have only implanted recently, but it is great for a couple of different running groups- those who are terrible at running marathon pace tempos and those who struggle with wrapping their head around their marathon pace.

So, instead of a traditional tempo run, start with something like 20×1 minute at your goal marathon pace with 30 seconds to 1 minute jog in between. With a 1-2 mile warm up and then an additional 1-2 mile cool down, you have a nice little run with some intensity. Each week, increase the time, but leave the recovery the same. Here’s a sample progression:

Week 1 20×1 min w/ 1 min jog
Week 2 15×2 min w/ 1 min jog
Week 3 10×3 min w/ 1 min jog
Week 4 8×4 min w/ 1 min jog
Week 5 6×5 min w/ 1 min jog
Week 6 5×6 min w/ 1 min jog
Week 7 4×8 min w/ 1 min jog
Week 8 3×10 min w/ 1 min jog

If you are doing a marathon and think this is what you would like to try first, then start ASAP, even if it is before you are actually training for your marathon. The goal later is to be running full traditional marathon tempo runs.

If you still have trouble and need to break up the runs, then consider these variations:

Weeks 1-2 5×1 mile (@ goal MP) with 2 minute jog
Weeks 3-4 3×2 mile (@ goal MP) with 2 minute jog
Weeks 4-5 2×3 miles (@ goal MP) with 2 minute jog
Weeks 5-6 2×4 miles (@ goal MP) with 2 minute jog
Weeks 7-8 2×5 miles (@ goal MP) with 2 minute jog

Don’t pay too much attention to how the weeks are numbered. You may do the first 8 weeks of your training using the first chart and then follow a modified structure of the second chart. As a coach, I’d like to see you be running longer tempos without a break during the last 4-6 weeks of your training block. That may mean doing some of the first column before they even begin training for their goal marathon just so that they can get used to running marathon pace.

High Mileage Runners:

For this group, I am referring to those at 80 plus miles per week. I have looked over a lot of the higher level plans of legendary coaches like Joe Vigil, Jack Daniels, and Renato Canova. All three incorporate runs at marathon pace (they don’t call them tempos) up to 18-20 miles. That’s a huge run at marathon pace. Granted, these higher numbers are for their elite runners, but there should be a bridge to those runners who are putting in 80-110 miles per week. I don’t see why they shouldn’t engage in some runs that are 12-16 miles at goal marathon pace.

Sample Progression:

Week Tempo
Week 10 10-12 mile tempo
Week 11 10-12 mile tempo
Week 12 12-14 tempo OR Tempo during week and a fast finish long run.
Week 13 14-16 miles @ pace. 20-22 miles total (depending on mileage and warm up and cool down)Should be a continual run.For most people, this would take the place of a long run
Week 14 10 mile tempo
Week 15 6 mile tempo OR a 2×3 or 2×4 @ pace early in week
Week 16 RACE

With our program we already spend a lot of time doing work at goal marathon pace, so I feel like some of these things are optional. You may be better off by simply adjusting your long runs to incorporate more marathon pace work, rather than trying to force more marathon pace work during the week. This is especially true if you aren’t looking to increase your mileage, just break up your traditional routine.

Feel free to download this article in PDF form: Marathon Tempo