Luke Humphrey Running

Every coach I had, from high school to professional was a stickler for pace. That’s not to say that we weren’t monitoring other variables, but the pace was what we focused on. It’s safe to say that over the years, I became pretty good at judging effort and correlating that closely to paces. To say it’s a skill is an understatement, and from the feedback I get from athletes, is that it’s not a skill that can be learned quickly enough. So, hopefully, we can get you on the right path if you find yourself struggling. 

The biggest issues I see with runners are: 

Looking at their watch all the time!  

Overcorrect

Rely on all the data except how it feels

What you will see, is a runner takes off, looks at their watch and it’s too fast (or too slow) and overcorrected. They then look after another 20-30 seconds and it becomes a game of too fast and too slow, but never settling into the rhythm of the night. Oops, I mean the rhythm of the pace. What else I will see is a runner has to be exact on the pace. So, if their tempo says 6 miles at 8:00 pace, then dangit, they are going to hit 8:00 pace! The problem ultimately goes back to whether they have a hard time finding the rhythm or just finding themselves aiming for perfection in an unperfect world. The third thing I will see is that the runner tries to absorb and react to all the data at once. I don’t see it a lot with power. I feel like those who run with power, just look at that. However, if they are using heart rate and pace, it can create issues.  Ultimately, what happens in some capacity is that the runner can’t find the right rhythm, over-corrects, and something hidden in what we are saying, they forget to correlate how they are feeling into the equation.  Does any of this sound like you? I don’t want to make it sound like it’s not a big deal to fix this, but there are things we can do that, over time, will make you a much better pacer at all speeds.  

There are a lot of things we can put into practice, but there are two things that you have to accept before we discuss. The first is that it takes time! And despite the age of having everything now, this will take time to develop. Definitely more than a month. More than likely, more than one training segment. It’s a skill that takes practice, so don’t get frustrated if after two workouts you don’t see any improvement. Give yourself some grace. It’s like I tell my kid in softball, I don’t care if you strike out every time as long as you get the bat off your shoulders! The second thing is something from my days at Hanson’s where we really dug down on nailing pace. That is, don’t overcorrect. If you overcorrect, you aren’t accomplishing anything! For example, if your prescribed tempo pace is 8:00/mile, but you come ripping through in 7:45, the goal isn’t then to still come through the second mile in 16:00, it’s now 15:45. But, Luke, that’s fast! You said to get on pace!? That’s right, but the pace is 8:00, so if you come through at 16:00, then that means that you ran the second mile at 8:15, too slow! So now you have two miles that aren’t on pace and nothing has really been accomplished. Again, it just goes to experience and learning how that feels, so give it time and take comfort in knowing that even if you aren’t perfect, you are improving! With that said, let’s jump into some things you can do to accelerate the rate of learning pace through feel. 

Things I do and teach: 

The first is having setpoints. This could be laps on the tracks, or a mailbox on a loop you run, or a mile marker on the bike path. This goes to what we discussed at the beginning of the post today. A person looks at their watch within the first few seconds of the repeat, it’s too fast or too slow, they overcorrect and then are on the other side of where they wanted to be. Let’s think about what’s going on, when you go from either standing or light jog to running hard so the pace is usually pretty fast, then you kinda smooth out (hopefully) and settle in. If you look at your watch during this initial phase, the pace is rarely going to be accurate this early on. So what I like is to have a checkpoint that’s at least a minute away and I just gauge effort til that point and then check my watch. I have a couple of data screens, but for workouts, I use one with lap distance and current lap average. One, I keep it to two data points so it’s easier for me to see! And so, it just cuts a lot of the extra noise out. I am also a creature of habit, so I run the same loops a lot, particularly for workouts. So, I’ll have some checkpoints that are fairly close to ¼, ½, ¾, and 1 mile. I try to force myself to not look at my watch until I hit these checkpoints. It is important to remember that unless you are way off, only slight adjustments will yield pretty decent changes in paces. A lot of times it’s just telling yourself to relax your arms or something and the slight pace adjustment can be enough. It’s rarely a huge adjustment to what you are doing.

Set a pace range. With our structured workouts, we have them set up so each pace we want you to run is in a range. For example, if your goal tempo pace is 7:00/mile the range is set up for something like 6:52-7:07.I believe it is something like 7-8 seconds either way. It’s enough so you aren’t required to be perfect, but not so much that you change the scope of the workout. If you go out of the range you get an annoying little buzz. But that’s annoying, coach! Yes, that’s the point! Ideally, you can take the buzz of the watch and use it to learn the feel of the pace and let that guide you instead of looking at the watch all the time. 

Long warm up. For faster workouts, something I like for runners who think if fast is good, then faster is better, I like to try a long warm up and then do the speed workout. So instead of doing 1.5-2 mile warm ups, maybe we can stretch that out to 4-6 miles and tucker ‘em out a little bit. Or, maybe do a regular warm up, then a short 1-2 miles @ lactate threshold, and then do something like 400’s or 800’s at 5k pace. I like stuff like this because it teaches runners proper pacing when they are tired. Teaches them how it will feel during the later stages of a 5k or 10k race. 

Cutdowns/survivals. Many of you have seen our cutdown workouts, where we will start out at about 60 seconds slower than the goal marathon pace and workout down to 10-20 seconds per mile faster than marathon pace. These are great because it goes from easy to hard and you’ll really get to know at what point your lactate threshold is. For me, It was always super easy from 6:00/mile to 5:30. Then 5:20 was like ok, we working a little, then 5:10 was like, ooh. This is now serious. Then 5:00 pace was like, man I don’t know if I can go another one. Then 4:50 was pretty much racing. You learned real quick where your limits were. These are good during early buildups and when you can’t think of another workout to do. I love these as they hit it all and teach you how to control yourself when it feels easy and how to balance the line when it’s getting tough. 

Now a couple of other workouts that we don’t do too many times are the survival cutdown and the 5x5. Ironically I have used both mostly for cross country, but they can be done anywhere. The survival workout was done on about a 2k or 3k loop. The only rules were that each loop had to be faster than the last one. If you didn’t you were pulled. It came down to the last man standing. There were some epic battles back in the day. This is when you need a tough workout. I’d use it sparingly! The 5x5 we did in college it was always a big boy. One we circled on the calendar. We always used it as a checkpoint. Once early season, once mid season, and once before championship season. With these, you had to get farther on each one. We never knew the distance of the loop we were running (and this was pre GPS) and the goal was to get further each one. So, kinda like the survival workout, but if you bombed it, you still had to keep going! Overall, it taught us to internalize the pace and be able to trust our judgment on if we were going over our head. So, in a way, failure was not a bad thing here- as long as you learned from it! 

Things I haven’t taught or done, but make sense. 

The first one is to time the workout and take the splits of your workout, but don’t look at your watch until AFTER the run. So go by feel during the workout, and then analyze after. I like the idea and with Final Surge and our pace zones for the structured workouts, it is really easy to access the workout and compare the data. Again, it’s not necessarily about being perfect during the workout but learning and internalizing pace to effort. If you can do that and start putting the data to the feeling, you will make some huge strides (pun intended)! 

The Second is to start small. I took this from Steve Magness who was tweeting about how if you want to improve VO2max, it’s probably easier for beginners to start with short repeats at high intensity- say 30 seconds apiece. If you go longer amounts of time, and you go out too hard, you defeat the purpose of the workout by going out too hard and then fatiguing, so you don’t really spend any time at where you are supposed to. All you did was get tired! The same idea can apply to pacing for workouts. In particular, I am thinking about the marathon tempo runs. If you struggle with going out too hard and then fading, then maybe try breaking them up at the beginning of the plan. Try doing 10x800 or 5x1 instead of a 5-mile marathon tempo. Make the repeat at marathon pace and the recovery very short, the shorter the repeat the shorter recovery. Each repeat is an opportunity to reset and dial in the pace instead of trying to average it out. I wouldn’t do this all the time because there’s also tremendous value in learning how to suffer through the long tempos. However, if you truly struggle with them,...

When we talk about long runs, the long run for the marathon is always the primary debate. For shorter races, even up to the half marathon, the long run is further than the race distance or at least up to a big percentage of what you’ll be racing. Yet, for the marathon, unless you go 20+ miles, the long run is going to not going to approach those same percentages. With that, when I prescribe a 16-mile long run, they are hesitant, if not downright defiant about not doing 16 miles. 

I don’t want to rehash some of the things I have discussed at length some of the attributes of the marathon length, but there are certain “rules” that need to be laid out before we dive into some of the new topics I want to discuss. It’s not about 16 or 20, it’s about keeping the long run within certain guidelines that will allow for other aspects of training to occur. In other words, we aren’t putting all of our eggs in the long run basket. We want to share, fairly equally, the importance of marathon-paced running, and running faster than marathon pace. For our athletes, we want to keep long runs at less than 30% of total weekly volume and really under three and a half hours. This allows us to take part in all the other workouts during the week. I would argue that the 16 mile long run (which fits into the guidelines I just stated for the vast majority of our runners) allows us to do much harder training and accumulate more weekly volume for longer stretches of time than if we just killed ourselves to get in a bunch of 20 milers on Sundays. 

Ok, with that out of the way, I want to hit on something that I didn’t discuss too much in blogs or in the book. So, you can pick up here if you are just here for the good stuff. This all goes back to the idea of super-compensation (If you are in the Run Club, watch out for a team talk about this), and how it relates to training. I have done blog posts on super-compensation in the past. You can see them here: 

How am I going to make it 26.2 at this pace?

Stress/Recovery Principles

In terms of super compensation specifically for the long run, I want to first go back to the tempo on Thursday. A tempo run is going to take anywhere from about 24-30 hours to go through the immediate decline in performance ability to recover, to super-compensation. So, if you do your runs in the morning, that means by Friday morning to Friday afternoon, you have reached that full “recovery” phase and by Saturday morning you have reached super compensation. However, on a week you have a 16 mile long run you will usually have an 8-10 mile run before that. A run like that is probably going to take in the 12-24 hour range to recover from. 

When I say recovery in this case, it’s referring mostly to glycogen replenishment. You are probably going to be at baseline, slightly below baseline, or slightly above baseline. Then you go and do the 16 mile long run. You put that all together, and you have put together 24-26 miles within a 24-26 hour period. That’s pretty good, right? I think so. So when Kevin says that the 16 miler you are doing is more like the last 16 miles of the marathon and not the first, this is a big part of why. You haven’t had so much recovery from your last SOS that you are in full super compensation mode. The key here though is that you have to be recovered enough from your previous SOS, which is why your easy runs have to be slow enough to allow that regeneration and recovery. 

What I will see is runners wanting to take Saturday off completely and then run long on Sunday, which then takes away some of the effectiveness of the shorter long run. I’d almost say then your long run on Saturday and take Sunday off, in that case. Then you don’t negate what we just discussed. I don’t think it needs to be the full 8-10 because if you do a tempo on Thursday, you only get one day before the long run, so I don’t believe you need to push it farther than the 6 miles you probably have on your schedule. 

The last part of this is to go back to whether 16 or 20 is the magic number. The truth is neither one are a magic number. My advice for people who are new to the Hansons Marathon Method and want to cheat that long run up, is just to be careful. It’s not an easy schedule. If you have been through the plan and feel like you are truly maxed out at what you can accomplish at that level, then start increasing the volume or changing the structure of the long runs. When you look at the criteria, at 60 miles peak, a long run can bump up to 18 and at 65 we’ll round up to 20 miles. What’s key is understanding what you are doing and why you are doing it. Try to look at things in bigger picture terms before narrowing the focus down to one run, because one run is impacted by what you did before and what you are going to do after. Hope that helps! 

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In my Boston Marathon training plans, I have a lot of specific hill-based workouts. Some straight uphill repeats, some workouts I call “Tired Hills”, some downhill repeats towards the end of the long run, and maybe a few other things. However, I don’t specifically say when a person should get on hills for the marathon tempos. I do this on purpose, but I also recognize that this should be addressed. 

First, let’s look at what we are trying to accomplish with the marathon tempo. 

1) learn pace. Some will argue that you aren’t in the right “zone” but to purposely skip out on learning what your race pace feels like to be in a certain zone, I feel like you are flirting with disaster come race day. 

2) Learn how to take fueling and fluids in at a race pace. This is a skill that doesn’t seem important at the surface level but will pay dividends on race day.

3) Be comfortable with being uncomfortable. 

4) Learn patience

In essence, from a nonphysiological standpoint, we are learning how to navigate the marathon. We are learning how to be patient early on and how to keep pace when we are tired. 

From a physiological standpoint, I have a big argument that the marathon pace creates physiological gains. 

1) running economy. You become the most economical at the pace you train for. So if you want to be economical at a marathon pace, do some training at a marathon pace. You also learn to be more efficient metabolically. 

2) Specific Endurance. Daniels states that there aren’t a lot of benefits physiologically that differ from what you would gain from easy running. I would argue that the more fit you become, the less benefit you will get from really easy runs and that stimulus has to change. For marathoners, you are looking at both general endurance (easy days) and pace endurance (mp tempos). A number of coaches echo this sentiment. Easy runs are viewed more as regeneration runs and don’t necessarily aid in physiological gains to performance. Keep in mind that we are referring to athletes with years of moderate to the high volume under their belts. Anyway, the point here is that marathon pace is doing a great service for your specific endurance in the event while staying below your lactate threshold. 

Ok, so I realize I went on a tangent there, but I think if we understand what we are trying to accomplish, then we can make better workouts. What I really wanted to get to was the idea of getting on a course similar to what you are going to be racing on. So, a course like Boston is a good example. It has a lot of rolling hills, some big uphills late in the race, and t is sandwiched between two sections of fairly big downhills. The overall result is a net downhill. Yet, whereas a race like Berlin or Chicago will see scorching fast times, a course like Boston will always be on the slower side (next to NYC) as the fastest major marathon course- despite being a net downhill! 

Continuing with the Boston theme, the emphasis is always on getting on hills by doing hill workouts and hilly long runs, which we prescribe as well, but what about marathon-pace runs? Let’s say in Boston you want to run 8:00 miles. I would bet you that you would have 0-5 of those miles at a range of 7:57-8:03 per mile, but still might very well average an 8:00 pace for the race! In 2006, I ran a PR of 2:15:22 about a 5:10 pace. Ironically, the only mile split that was 5:10 (or close to it) was miles 20-21 up Heartbreak Hill! Given that, you should put some tempos in that are going to simulate what you are going to be doing in the race. 

For a race like Boston or something like a Revel race where they drop you off a helicopter and you land at the bottom, I have a few guidelines. No more than 1-2 hill-based workouts in a week, maybe even less when just starting out the segment or you don’t do a lot of hills. So, if you have dedicated hill repeats on Tuesday, then stay flat for your next workout. Early on, you might not do any more dedicated hills for 10-14 days later. Assuming you are rolling along, then it might be Tuesday hills, flat for the next few days, including the tempo on Thursday. Then, if the runner wants, they can go out and get some hills in on their long run. The following week would then be flat for the first few days and then maybe the tempo could be on some hills, followed by a fairly flat long run on the weekend. 

To summarize

No more than two dedicated hill workouts (in some capacity) a week. If you live in a hilly area, there is an exception as you’d probably be better prepared anyway. 

No back-to-back hill workouts in a row. No hill repeats then a tempo or strength workout on hills. If comfortable, you can do tempo and long runs back to back because the intensity isn’t as high on either of these runs. Let muscle soreness be your guide on that. 

Allow at least 2-3 days between bigger efforts that involve hills. 

These guidelines have helped our athletes for a number of years thrive on courses like Boston and other bigger net downhill races, but the same protocol is useful for overall hilly courses, as well. The biggest thing is to recognize that hills create extra stress, particularly on muscle structure and it needs time to adapt and heal after each session. If you allow that to occur, then you’ll be extremely resilient on race day. You’ll also be comfortable with effort and overall pace when individual mile splits may cause someone else to freak out. In short, you’ll know what to expect on race day because you prepared for the race better!

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So I got done a bit of a rabbit hole the other day. I follow the accounts of My Sport Science and the feed is great if you want to learn anything about nutrition and supplementation for endurance performance. Well, a new blog entitled, "Do ketone esters boost EPO?” And I thought, well wouldn’t that be nice? I knew a little bit about ketones, but more about ketones as a product of high-fat low-carb diets, and not supplementation. Ketone Esters, now that’s another story. 

Ketones themselves are byproducts of fat metabolism and can be used as fuel, which is why they have gotten so much attention lately. In fact, ketones are known as the starvation fuel because they can fuel the brain in starvation conditions when carbohydrate is low. Glucose is what the brain would really like to be using. I don’t want to get into a nutrition debate on High Fat Low Carb diets, this is purely a performance post. With that said, the idea with performance was that ketones could be an alternate source of fuel for endurance performance. 

It was thought that ketones could create a glycogen-sparing effect. If so, this would be ideal, because, as we know, carbohydrate ingestion has been shown to increase performance. The problem is, to achieve ketosis, you would have to eat a lot of fat and drastically reduce carbohydrate. And, instead of sparing glycogen, ketones had been shown to simply inhibit glycogen from being utlitzed. The result was the inability to achieve a high level of performance. 

Here I would argue, as well, that if a person didn’t practice fueling and drastically decreased carbohydrate intake during training, it would be awfully hard to then give yourself a lot of carbohydrates on race day and not experience GI issues. So you are left in the same boat- not enough fuel to sustain the exercise at the desired pace. 

So that, it would seem, would be the end of the ketones idea as a supplemental fuel. However, what if there were a way to take the ketones without hanging the carbohydrate intake in your diet? That’s where ketone esters are. Ketone esters are essentially ketone supplements that would help mimic the effects of ketosis. Now, unfortunately, the jury is still out with these for fuel. The results were what we already mentioned- nonproductive and performance-limiting. Now, to be fair, the studies I looked at were based on 30 and 60 minute time trials. But, extrapolating that out to a 3-4 hour marathon, a person still is running at a fairly high level and using a lot of carbohydrates. Where does that cross over? A multi day race? An Ironman? A bike tour? A 100-mile run? I honestly don’t know. Besides, it seems like it's pretty bitter and when taken during exercise, GI issues seem to be fairly common. 

So now ketone and esters are done, right? Well, not exactly. People on specific diabetic drugs have been shown to have increased ketone bodies. On top of that, they had increased red blood cell mass- hematocrit and hemoglobin. People on low carb diets also show these characteristics. Pretty interesting, huh? Not yet? Well, understand that the main hormone for increasing RBC production is called EPO. Now, if you went out and shot yourself up with the drug, that’s definitely illegal. However, that’s also why people go to altitude. Altitude training stimulates EPO naturally. So that became the question- will ketone esters promote EPO production? So, the study looked at 9 healthy males doing 1 hour of cycling intervals. This is the type of workout that would naturally stimulate EPO production, as well. Afterward, some drank a carb and protein recovery drink while others drank the same drink with ketone esters. What they found was the EPO levels were about 20% higher in the group that ingested the ketone esters in their recovery drink. Essentially it was the same as training at 2000m altitude. That could potentially be huge! 

However, before we get too excited, there are some downsides. One, we don’t know how long this lasts. If it is a short term effect, how often do you have to replicate it? Do you have to do this every day? Could you do it after every hard workout? It naturally takes weeks to see changes in the blood. So, if you only do it here and there, would it be of any effect? Secondly, ketone esters are expensive. I looked at The Feed and 21 bottles cost several hundred dollars. This is key, because if you would ration them and it’s a daily supplement, then that’s a few bills wasted. 

Overall, it’s interesting. If you are an aspiring runner but can’t move to altitude, maybe this is a bit of an equalizer for you. The study was trying to establish proof of concept before jumping into a long term study. It seems like that was established, so it would be interesting to see what they come up with in the future. 

MySportScience Article One

MySportScience Article Two

MySportScience Article Three

From my experience, you have a deep division in the running world when you mention the word “treadmill.” For some, it’s a necessary part of being able to train during winter, dark mornings, and not leaving children alone in the home. For others, they’d rather fall and break a hip on black ice than submit themselves to “lesser” training on a treadmill. For me, it’s an available tool and as a younger man, I was probably in the latter camp. However, with each passing year, I have less to prove to anyone, and would rather stay healthy than force an unnecessary training error. If you are still in the camp of “outside is the only way to train” that’s fine, this just isn’t an article for you. It doesn’t particularly matter to me if that’s your stance. I know a few people who simply just can’t do it. They get dizzy. Their balance gets wonky. It’s just not going to happen for some. If you do use a treadmill and use one regularly, then please keep reading. 

Alright, with that out of the way, let’s get to the tho pic of the day- what’s the difference between running on a treadmill and over the ground? I know it’s been debated a lot, with some conflicting results. Data says nothing, and then data says there are differences. So what is it? 

Well, from a 30,000-foot view, not much. Running is running, right? And when you look at physiological metrics, they are pretty similar. But if you have run on the treadmill, especially on an irregular basis, I bet a lot of you will say, “it sure doesn’t seem like it!” I can definitely attest to that. It feels so much harder to run slower! That’s the first thing we notice when zooming in on the data- our self-prescribed pace is lower on a treadmill than it is over the ground. As I alluded to, some of this does depend on familiarity with the treadmill. People who are not familiar or used to running on the treadmill are more nervous about footing and balance. Personally, I have a great fear of doing speed on a treadmill because I a most certain I will be flying off the back end! 

So, some of it depends more on how we react to treadmill running than the treadmill itself. Is there anything physical that is different? Yes, there are two big items we can look at. 

The first, most are familiar with and is the lack of air resistance. When you run down the road, you create your own headwind. This slows you down because you fight that resistance, but it also cools you down. On a treadmill, you are stationary, so this effect is non-existent! At east paces, this is not as big of a problem, but unfortunately, the faster you run, the bigger the advantage. How is that an advantage? What I mean by that is say your speed work is at 6 minutes per mile pace. On a treadmill, that 6 min pace you are running, might use 4% less energy to run than it would on a track. However, the advantage you might have in not fighting the air resistance may not feel like it. It’s also been shown that the faster you are running, the more likely your heart rate and perceived exertion will be higher than if doing the same pace on a road or track. So physiologically it’s easier, but it feels harder! Bummer!

To play devil’s advocate, I believe it was a piece by Daniels, that indicated that it might be a wash on adjustment. This is because of the fact that if you are on a treadmill, it’s probably a warmer room- 65-70 degrees Fahrenheit. Plus, since you aren’t moving anywhere, the humidity that surrounds you, which would normally be pushed away as you ran forward, makes the effort harder. In fact, although having more of an advantage, it has been shown that even though you may have some advantage at faster speeds, both heart rate and RPE are higher on the treadmill than over the ground (at faster speeds). In any case, you should add some grade to your treadmill to make it a better correlation to what it would be outside, but how much probably has some wiggle room? We have a handy calculator that isn’t perfect but gives you a good idea of what pace you are simulating, based on the speed and grade that you are running at. You can view that calculator here

The second issue is stride. Think about running over the ground. You land and then push off from the static ground. This uses more hamstrings. On a treadmill, you are landing on a moving belt while you are stationary. So we aren’t really pushing off as much as we are lifting and landing. This will encourage more quadriceps action. This is me spitballing here, but the biggest issue I see with this is that so many runners are already quad-dominant runners. The quads are more fast twitch than the powerful slower twitch glutes. So, we could create more soreness with the initial treadmill runs as the quads are subjected to even more work than what they were designed for. Again, you throw this in with an unfamiliarity or uneasiness with treadmill running and form changes may occur. They may not be statistically significant, but they still, change what muscles are used and create some issues. 

Ok, before I move to the next phase of this post, I want to acknowledge that what I am saying can be a bit of discouragement for using a treadmill. From a pure difference standpoint, yes there are differences, but let me put a couple of thoughts out there. Do you think your RPE and heart rate are higher on a cold morning when you are fighting through 4 inches of fresh snow and worried that every step you take is going to put you on your hurt? Is fighting below zero temps and windchill really allowing you to hit the paces you want? The answer is no. So, while there are clearly challenges with running on a treadmill, there are just as many challenges for anyone training through a winter filled with snow, cold, ice, and unplowed running routes. 

Now, if you are going to be training on a regular basis on the treadmill, there are a couple things I recommend. Whether you are jumping on your “commercial grade” home treadmill or hitting the gym, don’t trust the calibration. These get off all the time. I’d also recommend not using your indoor or treadmill feature on your Garmin. I am sure the accuracy will improve, but right now I feel like there’s work to be done. Instead, I’d look at picking up a footpod for your GPS. Probably the most popular one right now is the Stryd and it will give you a ton of data, but it’s also pricer at about $250. Garmin used to make one that was about $50. I still see them on Amazon, but I am pretty sure they are discontinued. 

Lastly, a big problem most people have with treadmills is the boredom of running nowhere for a long time. Sometimes there are just not enough podcasts and playlists to get you through. To help fight this, there are companies like Zwift. I personally don’t know a lot about how it works, but i know the cycling community loves that version of it. There are also apps like Outside Interactive which have a growing library of different race courses that you can follow. It’s a great way to visualize a course you are training for, as well as help fight boredom. Personally, I am a bit of a minimalist when running, so I don’t have a lot of devices in me. So, I have gotten pretty decent at playing little games with myself to help pass time. The biggest thing I would do is run like I was doing a repeat workout. I’d run 10-15 minutes, starting out slower and then bumping up every 45-60 seconds until I got to my desired easy pace range. Then I’d systematically increase the grade by 0.5% so that I had to go through a cycle of flat to hill to back down every 6-8 minutes. All I would be focused on was that cycle, so before I knew it, I had 3-4 cycles in and my run would be almost over. If you have a treadmill that does downhill grade, even better! Overall, it’s better for you anyway, because you are simulating regular running more. 

At the end of the day, if running on a treadmill means you don’t skip a day, then please, get on the treadmill. Is it the same as running outside? No. However, if you are fighting a cold and snowy winter, that’s not the same either. Both will have adjustments that need to be made. Nothing is a perfect situation at that point. If you are a diehard outside, that’s cool. That’s admirable. But as a coach, I don’t really care how it gets done, as long as it gets done. Sure, there’s something to be said for bundling up and getting outside on easy days and “getting tough” as some would say. But also remember something my old man used to tell me- “It’s a thin line between tough and dumb.” (Usually I was on the side of dumb, which prompted the reminder) If you go on the treadmill, take what we discussed to heart and adjust as you need to. The winter is about staying upright, injury-free, and continuing consistency. If a treadmill allows that, you’ll come out the other side a better runner. 

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Recently, I had a new athlete sign up for coaching and we have them complete a training profile. One of the questions is “what are some of your training weaknesses?” The point of this question is obvious, what do you think you need to work on? However, we are also looking to see if you really think about what those needs are and then really establish a starting point for a conversation about those perceived weaknesses. 

Her main weakness was that she said she needed more speed work. However, I took a look at her other personal bests and questioned that conclusion. When I looked at her 5k, 10k, and half marathon best, these all suggested that she could run a marathon in anywhere from 4:37 to 4:45, significantly faster than the 5+ hour marathon she just finished. So, the reality is she is already fast enough to run a better marathon time. The issue lies somewhere else and we’ll go over potential reasons as we move forward. 

To be clear, I am not picking on this young lady at all. This is just a recent interaction regarding something I come across as a coach pretty often. Honestly, I think when she said speedwork, it was really in reference to structured work. If that is the case, then what she is saying is true in principle. Looking through her training history, she could add structured work and it would probably do amazing things. 

The moral of this story though is that running a certain time requires you to be “fast” enough first. This is where your own racing history in combination with the use of a race equivalency chart can come in really handy. What do I mean by that? I’ll use myself as an example. My fastest marathon is 2:14:38. If I plug that into a calculator is shows that I should be able to run 1:04:10 for a half marathon, a 10k in 29:08, and a 5k in 14:00. Comparing that to my actual PR’s, I ran 1:03:52, 29:02, and 14:10, respectively. 

There are two ways to look at this. One is that I pretty much maxed out what I could do, across the board. Based on my half PR, I probably could have eeked out a high 2:13 marathon. What’s interesting is I ran that 1:03:52 in February of 2011, then turned around and ran my marathon PR in June of the same year. Second, as my race distance decreases, the further away I got from what I was expected to run. This is why it’s important to know what your strengths and weaknesses are as a racer. This allows you to take generalities and turn them into specifics. 

Going back to my history, I was pretty much maxed out. For me to really make another step forward, I needed to improve my shorter distances. I probably needed to recover from my marathon and then move down and do some sport of speed segment. I didn’t necessarily need to improve my 5k and 10k times, but I definitely needed to at least get back to that level and maybe tolerate some workouts that would be in line with faster times. Then maybe use that speed work to run a faster half. Finally, come back and attempt a faster marathon. 

Going back to our young lady her quest to break 5. We already established that she was “fast enough” to run under 5 hours. What else could be the issue? To me, there are two big issues that need to be looked at. The first is you have to look at your training throughout the months and years previously. I’d really take a look a consistency over long periods of time. Many recreational athletes train for a specific race once a year, or a couple of times a year. Then they take summers or winters off. I am not knocking this at all, but when it comes to improvement, consistency is king. Even if it’s not hard training, being fairly consistent with staying healthy, and putting blocks of solid running can move your fitness up a couple of levels on its own! Secondly, within a training segment, does the training match what you are training for? Let’s take a typical recreation runner. They can put in 20-mile weeks pretty regularly and that’s enough to really run a solid 5k and a pretty decent 10k. It’s probably a little light to really have a good half marathon and I really couldn’t recommend that kind of volume for a marathon. What you’ll see a lot of times is an increase in weekly volume from say a 5k/10k runner to a marathoner, but it generally comes in the form of increasing long runs. For example, say the 5k runner running 20 miles a week decides they want to run a marathon. They might get up to 40-45 miles a week, but the majority of that increased volume comes from long runs going from 6-8 miles to 18-20 miles per week. They might add some marathon-pace work that would take them up further, but the tradeoff is that easy runs will be removed or decreased. The point is, if a person tries to keep training at a level they are used to, what that means is that it’s harder to utilize a race equivalency calculator. That calculator is assuming that you are going to be doing the training required to be fully prepared for the longer race distance. That’s what you see with a lot of folks in that 4:30-5+ hour range. The pace itself is not overly taxing, but they tend to slow down more and more from miles 16-18 and above. A lot of times this is simply an indication that the overall endurance is just not there to allow a person to hold that pace. 

To close out, if you are a person who is looking at a marathon goal time, or even a half marathon goal time, and you just seemingly fade at the end of the race over and over just to have those goals slip away with each passing mile, then these are the things I would put my focus on. Do my other race distances line up with what I am trying to run? If not, first work on bringing those down to be more in line with the goal time for the longer event. If so, move to the training. Do I train consistently throughout the year? If not, make that a priority. If so, does my training line up with what it should be for the longer races? If not, make that a priority. First, focus on building the volume in a balanced way. Second, add intensity. Give yourself time to adapt to one training stress at a time. If you follow a similar path when addressing your true strengths and weaknesses, then you can really shorten the time needed to be in a position to reach your goal.

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I remember in high school everyone had had these team shirts with “motivational” quotes. My favorite was “Runners have no offseason!” Soooo tough! Looking at it now and then seeing what goes on now, that’s probably not my first choice for a shirt. In high school and college, We went from cross country to indoor, to outdoor track. If you qualified for State Finals in High School or the National Championships in college, then you went all the way to mid-June. Then turned around and went right into cross country. Now, luckily I had a college coach that wouldn’t let the better runners race until October for XC and we never really trained for indoor track. We used it as a block to get ready for outdoors, but a lot of coaches just pushed it to the max 24/7 and it’s an easy way to burn kids out. When I started coaching adults in 2006, we didn’t really have year-round marathon races. Sure, they existed in the winter but they were not nearly as popular as they are now. I feel like there were two marathon seasons- April and May, then October and November. Now it’s pushed to late December and into January/February with races. June is becoming more popular with races in the Northern part of the US, or people start traveling to the southern hemisphere to find some races. When we first started, there were natural periods for off-seasons- summer and winter. Now, I feel like there truly isn’t an off-season. So today I want to discuss the off-season and what it means to take one. 

First, what does “off-season” actually mean? When you look at all the major sports like football, baseball, basketball, golf, and hockey, it’s a block of time where they just seemingly disappear, right? I am a baseball guy and a huge Detroit Tigers fan and once October hits they disappear until Spring Training in March. Ok, let’s be honest, they disappeared somewhere around June this year (2022). You know what I mean, though. Are these guys/gals really taking 2-3 months off from everything? No, it’s not a complete rest from activity, but it is a time to work on weaknesses, recover from a nagging injury, and hone skills. To me, an “off-season” for running would be several weeks of either very specific training to work on weaknesses, or really a restful time where the body has ample time to regenerate and recover, which will allow for a dedicated block of hard training. 

What I currently see for a lot of people is not anything that resembles an off-season. What I see is an inadequate downtime, a few weeks of buildup, then jumping right into another training segment. Sometimes they are chasing after a qualifier, but I also think that they assume that if they aren’t training hard, they’ll lose that precious gainz. The reality is, you are a lot more likely to make more progress sooner by taking a half step back and then pushing forward again. 

Speaking of, let’s go back a half step. Remember I said that I saw an off-season being either really focused training or generally lax training? I want to go back to that because I think there are two distinct places for these. 

Since I am working on this in the fall, let’s start with that. With training hard all summer, then holding it together the first few weeks of the school year, it’s hard enough. Then throw in a marathon, and you are ready for a break! For most of my audience, after an October marathon, it’s time for an extended break. Not only for the things I just mentioned, but also because they go from downtime to the big holiday season with Thanksgiving and the Christmas season. There’s a ton going on. Taking a break from a really structured training program isn’t a bad idea here. Plus, you throw in winter training and it’s a good excuse to take a break. If I get can get a runner to do a workout a week, a long run every 2 weeks, and maintain roughly 65-70% of their peak volume, then we can make it through the holidays, and not lose much (if any) overall fitness, fully recover from marathon training (both mentally and physically), and get recharged to go after another marathon in the spring. 

Putting this into practice:

Let’s say you run a mid-october Marathon and take two weeks off for recovery. You take another two weeks to gradually build your volume back to say 50% of what you were at the peak. So, if you peaked at 60 miles per week, the goal would be 30 miles per week of easy running. From there, you could start a 6-week base plan that would be 40 miles per week. That would a) put you at about 65% of your peak volume and b) put you to the end of December with no real commitments to running. Heck, if you want to jump into a Turkey Trot and a Jingle Bell Run to be silly with your running crew, this is a perfect time! Then you can get to the new year without being over-committed to running (parties and get together's are on you!) and hopefully itching to get back out there. I just find that when we try to push too hard through this time frame, we lose interest later on. If we start a marathon segment already depleted mentally and a little bit physically it’s hard to stay motivated for another 4-5 months. In terms of progression, it’s like doing workouts- it’s not the workout that makes you fit, it’s the recovery where the adaptations take place! Taking that recovery after a hard segment is where those adaptations can fully take hold. 

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The second scenario is where we want to really focus on something that’s a weakness, or even nonexistent in our training. A big area for the athletes I work with is their overall speed. In the winter, this doesn’t really make sense for people who are dealing with cold, snow, and wind for a few months. However, if they ran a spring marathon, the idea of starting marathon training again in June is not ideal for starting up the grind of marathon training again. So, a good time to reduce volume, and increase intensity is after a spring marathon and then before the fall marathon season. I have written about this before, but it also reduces the buildup time for the marathon in the fall. 

The idea here is to work on true overall speed. Let’s face it, we are doing speed during the first weeks of the marathon segment, but it’s not intended to take your 5k time down, per se. Rather, it’s the speed in terms of its faster than the marathon pace. If we do a 6-12 week speed segment, we can bring down some of those times. Then we come back to the marathon and some of those places don’t seem so scary. I think something like this is key if you’ve done a few marathons in a row and just seem to have plateaued. 

The nice thing about doing something like this is that you can back off the volume. Easy runs will be a little shorter. SOS days will be a lot shorter in terms of volume. So you can work on something with less of a time commitment. As a parent, I know how valuable this can be during the summer months. A lot of times training takes a back seat to entertaining children during the summer. 

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Again, 60-70% of your peak volume would be just fine for a speed segment. You can get a lot done with that. Using our example, if you are hitting 60 miles a week during marathon training, then 40-45 for a speed segment would be plenty of volume to allow you to get everything you need to in. 

You may also want to consider something that doesn’t involve your run training, but maybe something like strength training or nutrition. Maybe what’s holding you back are solid habits. Taking time in a down period can be key to making new habits. You may want to take 6-8 weeks to establish those habits while keeping training lower. So this might be a combination of base training coupled with a skill development component like strength or nutrition. Honestly, I’d pick one or the other. I don’t like overloading a person with too many things. If you find yourself struggling with recovery, I’d first look at getting help with nutrition. If you find yourself breaking down, maybe start with strength. These are both going to be long-term projects, but the best time to start them is when you are in an off-season. It takes time to adjust and 6-8 weeks where this can be a focus is a very good start. 

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I didn’t touch on this, because I am still working on my own thoughts with this, but if you are injured and it has to do with form, finding out specifically what you need to work on would be a great off-season modality to add. We can get into whether it’s a strength or cueing issue (it’s probably a combo), but seeking out someone who does gait analysis and provides programs can be another great resource to look at. So, it might be a form of strength training you add, but something very specific to your needs. 

The bottom line is that if we push the envelope nonstop, we plateau out. If we never work on skills or we never recover or never just even take a mental break from the hard work that is training, we set ourselves up for burnout, disappointment, injury, etc. What should be an overall joy in our life, a part of who we are, becomes a job and is more of a burden. Off-seasons are key and in the long term they will make you more successful, and more balanced, and you’ll enjoy the sport a lot more.

So, I am cruising the social media and lately, I’ve been seeing a lot about the 80/20 rule in running. As I write this, fall marathon training is “heating” up and so it makes sense that this makes the round again. So, I wanted to break this down, how we got to this point and some practical advice around the issue. 

What does 80/20 actually mean? 

At its basic of definition, it means that 80% of your running is “easy” and 20% of your running is “hard”. That seems awful subjective, huh? What’s easy for some, is hard for others. So, how are we defining easy and hard? When you look at it’s most recent popularity, you have to look no further than Matt Fitzgerald and his book, 80/20 Running. Matt uses Ventilatory Threshold and a fancy term, Respiratory Compensation Threshold. You may also see these labbelled as VT1 and VT2.  Basically, you are using the “Talk Test” to determine intensity.  VT1 would be where you see noticeable increase in breathing rate. VT2 would be where you can no longer trash talk your training partner and are limited to one or two words between huffing and puffing. 

If you are looking at the figure above, you see a classic blood lactate level vs exercise intnesity chart. The harder you exercise, the more blood lactate increases and you reach certain thresholds. One of those byproducts is CO2, and our breathing rate increases to get rid of that. So, monitoring your breathing is a practical way to measure how hard you are working, in conjunction with other data. 

When looking at the 80/20 rule and the visual of the above figure, what’s the biggest thing that sticks out to you? Right, that it’s a lot of very easy running and a little bit of pretty darn hard running! You have a bunch of running in the middle that is pretty much left alone if you are following the philosophy to the letter. What you are left with is something called polarized training. Many of you are stsarting to connect the dots here with other terms we have heard along the way, like the hard/easy principle or hard days hard and easy days easy line of thinking. At the end of the day, it’s all related. 

The question becomes at what pace or effort do these thresholds line up? For VT1, that’s going to be a pretty comfortable pace. That’s going to be anywhere from about 50-75% of your VO2max. That’s a big range! For a new runner, it’s going to be closer to the 50% mark and for highly trained runners, that’s going to be closer to that 75% mark. I’d say most recreational runners who are consistently running are probably around the 60% mark. That’s an easy pace, slower than your marathon race pace. 

As far as VT2, that is the point where things start getting pretty tough. This is the point where lactic acid begins to accumlate at an almost exponential rate and you aren’t going to be able to sustain that pace for long. I have always known it as the pace you can hold for about an hour, but see 30-60 minutes in some publications. Like VT1, it’s going to be dependent on training level. A newer runner won’t be able to go a full 60 minutes at that pace, whereas a highly trained runner get just about get to a half marathon at that threshold. For recreational runners this is probably around 10km-15km race pace. 20km pace for a really solid male distance runner. Women are “quickly” reaching that point as the women’s world record is now under 1:03 for the half marathon.  

How are we measuring 80/20?

From my understanding, the original research measured the breakdown in terms of number of workouts. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if that was per seven days, 10 days, 14 days, or 21 days. If it were 10 days, it’d be easy, 8 workouts easy and 2 workouts hard. If it’s anything else, then you get into partial workouts and that’s not exactly practical. The most common ways now are by training volume (miles or km) or in minutes. 

What about that middle area? 

I don’t want to spend a lot of time discussing whether the 80/20 principle is valid. That’s not really the debate, for me. I think HMM and Cumulative Fatigue are all along the spectrum of the 80/20 line of thinking. Where the big difference lies is that big ole elephant in the room- that “zone 2” area. To me, as a marathon and half marathon coach, that’s a big problem. That’s exactly where marathon and half marathon pace lie for all of my athletes! From my perspective, that’s where the idea of a pure 80/20 model gets cloudy and loses some practicality for my runners. 

In my research into other resources on 80/20, I was led to a study that compared recreational 10km runners by following the true 80/20 ideals vs another group who utlized the Zone 2 area. This article was great because it looked at a section of runners not often studied, tried to use for practical terms of volume, and opened my mind to some other thoughts. 

Let’s look at some of the basics of the study

Two groups of similar runners in two groups. One group utilized polarized training. The other group also utilized training in what they described as “between the thresholds.” They both did the same base training and then the same number of weeks in their designated groups. They both ran 5-6 days per week and they both ran on average 50 km per week and peaked at about 70 km per week. Group one acquired a training distribution of 75% in Zone 1, 5% in Zone 2, and 20% in zone 3. Group two acquired a distribution of 45%/35%/20%. Each program had two “hard” days per week. They also did the same strength training. In Group One, 10k times went down from 39:18 to 37:19. In Group two, the times went from 39:24 to 38:04. Which wasn’t found to be statistically significantly different. Now a few things, the time improvements in Group One came out to about 5%, whereas in Group Two, it was about 3.5%. While not statistically significant, the authors did some other fancy analysis and found that the zone 1 training was more likely to be the factor for improvement. I admit I don’t totally understand it. But to me, that is not the focus of that. 

To me, there’s some other details that are buried in here and if pull them out, we can really take a better look at their info vs. how people actually train. In group one, if they were doing 20% of their volume in the fastest zone, that’s anywhere from 10k to 14k per week at paces that are close to 10k pace and fasster. If training for a 10k, that’s plenty and I don’t see any issue. This is especially true because there's only 3-4 more days they were running and would make sense that they were easy. There was no word on if they did a longer run in there? 

However, if you look at the second group- you still have that 10-14 km in there weekly schedule, but then they also have 35% of their volume coming from that dreaded Zone 2! That’s 17-24 km at paces anywhere from marathon to let’s say 20km pace! For one, that’s a huge range, and two, who actually does that, especially for a 10k training plan? I’ve looked at a lot of different coaches plans and I can’t think of any 10k plan that incorporated that. I get blasted for our 10k and half marathon plans all the time, and they don’t even approach that. So, I am left to believe that Group 2 was probably pretty tired by the end of that study and are probably thankful that they finished. 

My overall takeaways 

For shorter race distances, the polarized works well. I believe mainly, that this is because your race distance lies in the 20% zone. So, you get lots of work at and around your race pace. You also will get more work per week than what your actual race distance is. For example, if you run 50 km per week and follow the 20% rule, then you get 10km per week around race pace. If you are running a 10k, this is the distance you’d race. It works out very well. Then, the rest of your time is spent recovering from that fast work and building your general aerobic fitness and endurance. The whole process works out very well! 

My other take away is that at some point you will have to get more specific to the group that you are working with. Thresholds shift as fitness changes or as running ability changes. Absolute volumes will shift as volume increases. Is there a cap? For example, If I am running 100 miles a week, do I want to do 20 miles per week at 20km pace or faster? Probably not. I think you have to one, have some leeway in how far you extend your Zone 1 and I aso think that you have to break down your zone 3 even more specifically. For example, out of that 20% of hard running, how is that broken up? Is it all at that VT2 level? Is some of it faster than that. Just keep that in mind as runners move from being a beginner to novice, to more advanced. Your idea of that 20% has to change and become more specific. 

How does that transfer to marathon training? 

I eluded to it before, but I think the 80/20 rule of training gets cloudy when training for races where you’ll be racing in the Grey Zone (Zone 2, whatever you want to call it). During the early parts of an HMM marathon plan, the primary focus is a little bit of speed (hard) and some shorter marathon pace (zone 2). So you are right off the bat, the 80/20 rule gets tossed. It might be 80% easy, but the 20% “hard” would have to include everything from marathon pace up. And honestly, this might be ok, because marathon pace early in a training segment, might be closer to threshold pace (VT2) than it is to VT1. 

However, once you get into the race specific stretch of a plan, are we doing anything that’s faster than VT2? In the traditional sense, no. If you were to break down the classic HMM plan, you would be pretty close to 60 miles/week. Out of that 60, you’d be running 6 miles worth of Strength and 8-10 miles of marathon pace work. This would all be surrounded by a long run and easy running. So, including easy runs, warm ups, cool downs, and long runs, your total EASY volume would be about 75-80%. However, the other 20% is really more in the Zone 2 and not the

I have made the summer of 2022 the summer of reinforcing heat and humidity adjustments with my athletes. It has had some pretty solid success with those who have taken it to heart. They are feeling better, recovering faster, and aren’t feeling completely overwhelmed with where they are at and how long they have left to go before the fall. Now that I have them buying in more, some questions have come up about some of the details of the heat and humidity adjustment calculator. So, I thought this would be a good time to put some more thought in how to use this tool based on numbers, but also the human element. 

The goal of the Calculator

I am writing this during the 2022 World Championships in Eugene and what has biome clearer than ever is that technology can create more problems when we rely 100% on what it tells us. If you don’t know what I am talking about, the starting blocks have create a fiasco in the sprints because the starters are relying solely on the tech and not including human judgment. So, my point with that, is the calculator should be a guide, but, please use human judgment, too! 

If we do that, what I see is people recognize that pace won’t necessarily equal effort, but that doesn’t mean the fitness isn’t there. These adjusted numbers show you that the effort you are putting in on some of these workouts is appropriate and will equal faster paces in the fall. The reason this is important is that we don’t spend the early part of our training program overdoing it and struggling to find our form come the main part of the segment. In short- it will save your segment! 

Things to consider when using 

Where you live will play a big role in how much heat and humidity will affect you. I always torched by people who are like “OMG, I can’t believe you melt at 75 degrees! That’s like every morning for me!” The people who mock people like me are forgetting one thing. There’s places in this country where you can have close to 75-100 degree changes in April and even May. There are days where it can be 30 degrees in the morning and 75 degrees in the afternoon. There’s weeks where we can have a snow day from school and a day where are kids are begging us to wear shorts to school! There’s days during June and early July here in Michigan where a morning run can be in the 50’s, but by 3 pm the temps are in the 90’s. My point is, when you are exposed to constant temps and humidity, you will not be affected as much as a person who experiences those temperatures irregularly. 

Another thing to consider is your training status. If you are relatively unfit, the toll of heat and humidity is going to be higher than someone who is, say, 6-8 weeks into a training program. One should also consider how much time they are outside. If a person is doing runs mostly 30-45 minutes per run outside, then they won’t acclimate as fast as someone who is accumulating 60-90 minutes per day of running outside in the conditions. Eventually, the first person will acclimate, but it could potentially take longer than the second person. 

The third thing to consider is what you are training for. My calculator has weighted the different runs. Faster runs, repeats, and even threshold runs are less affected than marathon pace tempos and long runs. So, if you are marathon training and putting in a ton of sub threshold work, your performance is going to be more affected than a person training to run 5k races. 

The last thing I want you to consider is body size. A perfect example of this was during the 2008 Beijing games and the predictions for the mens marathon were slow, slow, slow! Everyone was saying the champion would run anywhere from 2:11 to 2:15 to win the Olympic Gold. However, one of the greatest, Sammy Wanjiru (RIP), stood about 5’2” and 110 pounds. He took the pace out HOT (literally and figuratively). Nobody went with him, and the commentators said over and over that this was not going to end well. Well, it did end well and Sammy broke the Olympic record. Now, not to say that his body size was the only reason for this performance, but it definitely played a big role. The less mass you have to lug around and the less surface area you have collecting heat, the more likely you are to fair better than a bigger person. Some of that is obviously beyond your control, but it can guide you when adjusting your paces. 

How I coach athletes to use

When an athlete needs to adjust, the first thing they do is put the info into the calculator. They have a good idea of what the average weather conditions are going to be. That spits out adjusted training paces from easy/recovery, all the way to sprinting pace adjustments. It also provides a range of paces surrounding the original training pace. For instance, under good conditions your marathon pace may be 8:00. It’s not going to say 8:00, it will give you a range of 7:50 to 8:10, roughly. The same will be true for the adjusted range. As the speed decreases, so will the range. So, for repeats, your range will be smaller than your long run pace range. 

How they use the info is up to them. Hopefully, they have considered the things we’ve talked about and have an idea of where they should be. Some of it is trial and error, so it doesn’t have to be perfect the first couple times. Some of the athletes just time themselves and keep a rough idea of where they should be. Some just go by effort and then see where they fell in the adjusted range after the workout. Some, change the paces in their structured workout. 

Where people tend to struggle the most is with easy to long run paces. Since there is a big range here, sometimes we can slow down too much! If you tend to run your easy runs and long runs towards the faster end of the range, you might simply need to slow down to the slower side of your unadjusted range and not necessarily do an adjusted pace range. If you find yourself with an altered stride, or it feels too slow, then just use your effort as your guide and don’t be stuck on what the adjusted numbers say you should be at. 

How do I progress this?

The question as summer goes on is how do you know when it’s time to progress? There’s a few ways. One is that if you are using current pace and going to adjust incrementally, then just move your paces along at the same increments. For instance, if you started out with a goal of 8:00/mile in the marathon, but your best is 8:20, you may have started the segment at 8:20 with the idea of taking a few seconds off that pace every 6 weeks, or something like that. Continue on that path and then just readjust your paces. 

The second is to keep a good log. Keep track of RPE (How hard it felt). If you are running the same paces and it went from feeling like an 8 to a 5, then you are adjusting and you can probably bump up a bit. Also, here’s a great opportunity for heart rate. If your heart rate is trending down over a few weeks at the same workout, in our case, tempos, then you are adapting. 

The biggest thing will be the pace itself. Let’s continue with the 8:00/mile example. You have a goal of 8:00/mile. Let’s say your adjusted pace is 8:20/mile. So, you start at 8:20’s and it feels hard. After a few weeks, you are now forcing yourself to slow down to run 8:20’s. Don’t adjust the goal time, but adjust your pace based on the same effort. If that pace is now 8:10-15, roll with that! Ideally, that natural pace just keeps coming down at the same efforts. 

How do I know I am really ready?

I get it. How am I supposed to run pace x, when I feel all out and pacy y? It’s not good for the psyche. Here’s how I look at it. If I am running a late September to early October marathon, I feel like it’s 50/50 on the weather. If I get a hot day, at least I know what I am capable of. If I get a screamer day, it’s like being on a downhill course. It’s just going to be fast. From my experience training for a lot of Chicago Marathons, is that I’d get a day in early September that would fall on a big workout. I’d guage my effort expecting to be slow, but the weather would be nice, the course would be right, and I’d fly. It’d be like a switch was flipped. I’d wonder where that fitness has been, but it was always there. It had just been suppressed all summer. The trick is to recognize it for what it is. Don’t use that as an excuse to train harder. Bottle that and save it! That’s where people who try to force the issue in July and August ultimately come up short. They may push hard and hit those paces early on, but when that day happens like I just mentioned, there’s nothing there to take advantage of. It’s already been spent. That’s when you will start to hear the, “How am I supposed to run 16 more miles at this pace?” That’s a tough spot to be in. 

Alright, so that’s some more thoughts on heat adjustment, how I use it, and how you can individualize to your own situation. Hopefully, you can put some of this to use for a monster fall! The big thing is, to take the algorithm for what it is. Don’t be afraid to tweak it to make it custom for you. 

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If you have followed me for any length of time, you know that I am a big proponent of even to negative splits. When we look at world records and world-class performances, they are usually run with even, to negative splits. The truth is though, that to do this is tough. To actually accomplish this is tough feat in itself. How does that translate in to the typical recreational runner? To be honest, it’s tougher. I created a poll in my Facebook group for runners who were over four-hour marathoners. 48% percent of them said that they positive split their fastest marathon by at least 5 minutes (second half slower than the first). That’s not exactly great odds. 

When looking at some other data, Outside Magazine has posted two recent articles on the matter with some interesting information. In Amby Burfoot’s article, he cites research that included races from 717,000 runners over the course of several years. The main take away was that 28% of men and 17% of women would hit the wall during there career. This was defined as a pace for a 5k segment of the race that was 20% slower than their beginning paces. This was consistent across age group and ability levels. The average time lost was about 31 minutes for men and 33 minutes for women. That’s a soul crusher! The thing with that is, 20% is a huge number. If you were running 20 minute 5k’s during your marathon, that’s slowing down to 24 minute 5k’s (at least). That is losing over a minute a mile. By the data in the research, it looks like people were losing a lot more than 20%! 

This brings me to the the next article I recently saw. This one is from Matt Fitzgerald. In this article, he cites a study that looked at variances in runners as finish times slowed. Essentially, 4:00:00 to 4:30:00 marathoners tend to slow 15% and 4:30:00+ runners, tend to slow nearly 17% over the course of their marathon. Even sub 4 marathoners tend to slow roughly 13%.  These are still pretty big numbers, and the average of all performances. However, you can see the trend here.  

Ok, so I am looking at this data and thinking a few thoughts. The first thing that came to mind was another Outside article that appeared in 2016. This took a look at all the Strava data compiled. Here’s some interesting stats- Sub 3 marathoners ran the most- averaging about 50 miles/week. 4 hour marathoners? Maybe half that. Also, average miles were closer to race pace in training the closer you were to a 4 hour marathoner. At 4 hours, runners tended to run faster or right at goal race pace in training. 4+ hour marathoners tended to do less than 5 miles in over half of their weekly runs. As you can imagine, training that is done over the course of the segment, plays a huge role in how well a person can guage pace and effort, practicing fueling, and establishing a clear break in paces. 

The second thing that came to mind was yet another article, this time from Alex Hutchinson. This article looked at the idea of critical pace or power. This is the threshold that you can hold for about 30 minutes. This is important for a couple reasons. One is that it’s a very good indicator of marathon ability. For example, elite marathon runners can run about 96% of their CP for a marathon. We aren’t sure what recreational runners can maintain, but it’s safe to say that it’s not 96%. The second part to this is that the longer we are out on our feet, the lower our CP becomes. In the same study, it was shown that after two hours CP dropped by 9%. How much might it drop for a 3 hour marathoner? A 4 hour marathoner? These are all interesting questions that undoubtedly contribute to the complexity of fatigue. 

Putting it all together

My head starting hurting a bit trying to wrap my baby brain around all this, but let’s try to break down the main points here. 

The slower we are, the more variance in pace (amount we slowe down) will increase. Running even to negative splits is a lot easier said than doneSlowing down is different than hitting the wall, BUT, is it inevitable that you will slow down during 3:45+ marathon? 

My coaching take

When I was writing Hansons Marathon Method, I looked at stats from USA Running and the thing that jumped out at me was the continual slowing of America’s runners. When I wrote the second edition the average finish time had slowed to close to 4 hours. Part of my mission was to change that. I think that when you look at what the Strava data showed above vs how we train, it might as well be two different universes. When I look at that data from Strava, it becomes glaring that the average marathon runner in the US runs a few days a week for a couple miles and then throws the bulk of their training into a long slow run on the weekend. Like I’ve said before, they are training to survive the marathon, not perform at the marathon. I whole heartedly believe that if the training is changed, the performances will drop. Take the Strava data- If a person running 4-5 hours is running 25 miles a week and doing a long run of 10-15 miles (at least), they have about 10 miles spread over the other other 6 days for the week. That’s not a lot of opportunity to get any other kind of work done. 

By putting in more volume you

Allow more opportunity for different type of work to be doneYou learn how to run tiredYou learn how to guage effort betterYou have a more realistic view of what you are currently capable of

In terms of the variance in pacing, or really, the slowing down of pace during the marathon. I do think it is easier for runners who are in the 4 hour range of the marathon to unintentionally go out way over their head. When looking at calculators, you will find that you can run a half marathon about 17 seconds faster per mile than you can a marathon. So, if your marathon pace is 9:30/mile, theoretically, you can run a half in about 9:13/mile. This doesn’t seem to change much (on paper, anyway). The faster you are, the harder that 17 seconds will feel. You know that if you push too hard, a price will be paid. But, if you are in a position where your easy days during the week were faster than your goal marathon pace, it’s just another run. It doesn’t feel any different than what you’ve done during the training block anyway. So, it might feel totally comfortable, but after 60, 80, 120 minutes, that CP continues to back track and what once was easy now becomes extremely difficult. If there is still another 60+ minutes to run, that’s a long time to suffer. So, when I visualize what that looks like, it becomes pretty clear why those time variances just creep up and up and up.  

Other things you have to do in order to put yourself in position to even/negative split

Practice how you want to race. This goes for long runs and marathon tempos in particular. If you crash and burn on these while never changing strategy, then you’ll probably race like that too. Use those same runs to practice fueling and practice fueling like you mean it. Going back to the CP article, CP decline was countered by taking in carbohydrates at a rate of 30-60 grams per hour. Most people here need to be at least 45-60 grams per hour. Run different races. Take segments to develop thresholds like CP and Lactate Thresholds. Improve thes and marathon performance and pacing will both improve. Have a healthy realationship with technology. 

At the end of the day, we know that marathon performance is a complex mixture of physiological, environmental, physical, and mental properties. We also know that as we get tired, all of these things change. If we never train in a situation where we are in a similar state, then we cannot expect the body to withstand it’s initial shock being on the biggest day of the segment. Yes, it’s more time consuming, but it’s so worth it when you put a great race together and are able to hang tough over the last 10-15k of the marathon. By the looks of the data, most runners don’t put themselves in a position for success because the training just isn’t there to suppor what they want to do. When you see headlines about how it’s just so hard to even pace over the marathon distance, note that it is, but you’ve done the training to support the outcome. 

Matt Fitzgerald’s article: 

Amby Burfoot article

Research article

Strava data

Critical power

Late fade