Daniels M Pace (Read 887 times)

YO,

 

M pace will get easier as you adjust to your increasing mileage.  Especially your cumulative injury free mileage.  Your log suggests you just bumped up the volume a bit...give it time, maybe 2-3 months, in that 50 mpw range.  fwiw, the move from 35 mpw to 50mpw was a game changer for me this year.

 

Given your recent 5ks (mostly just over 20 iirc), I think 1:30HM now might be a stretch (on your current base).  Keep investing in miles, and include a little quality once or twice a week.  Muscle has memory and you'll be back at 1:30 and your current M pace will be easy by the spring. 

Yeah, I'm hoping the mileage will help in a big way. I can hardly believe that I've gone the entire year without getting injured; I spent my first couple years of running plagued by lower leg, hamstring, and ITB issues. That's why I've been so conservative about mileage increases. It took me 12 months to work up to 50mpw again. My plan is to hold it here for a while - 2-3 months at least, but probably longer, before bumping to 60. When I ran 1:30 a couple years ago, it was after about a year of 50-60mpw.

Keeping with the Daniels theme - should I keep the quality and jump into one of his plans in Phase II, or would it make sense to start with his Phase I and drop the quality for a couple of weeks? I think he only has E running and strides in Phase I, but I've been doing 1-2 workouts a week for several months now so I'm not sure if it would hurt me to get rid of all that for a month or so.

It probably wouldn't hurt you to do all easy for a while, especially if you've had some niggles in the past. The strides will keep your technique up if you're doing them right.

Of course, you'd probably be fine keeping one quality day  per week for that time as well. 

I'm thinking about using Daniels to train for the 5k and a couple of half marathons in 2013, so I've been trying to read his book all the way through, which I've never done before. So far it has been really cool and I think a Daniels-inspired plan would fit my temperament pretty well. But I am really confused by his comments about marathon pace. My most recent 5k gives me a VDOT of 51-52, which gives me an M pace of 7:02-7:09. This actually sounds somewhat reasonable when I think about training for and racing a marathon - that is, it's probably about what I could run with optimal preparation. But there is no way that I could do a training run at this pace, especially one close to 90 minutes, which seems to be what he calls for. Without competition and during a heavy week of training, that would be practically race-effort for me past maybe an hour, and even that would not be remotely comfortable. Yet he states that M pace is not much harder than E pace for most runners (this might not be exactly how he puts it - I don't have the book in front of me) and that you might feel good dropping down to M pace during an easy run when you are feeling particularly strong. For me, that 'fast easy' pace is nowhere near 7 flat - it's more like 7:20-7:25. Is this just a question of me needing more miles and more aerobic strength, or is M pace actually as aggressive as it sounds? 

 From page 101 of the second edition: "I like the duration of an M run to be between 90 and 150 minutes without exceeding 16 miles".

From page 34: "Marathon pace varies from about 10 to 15 seconds per mile slower than threshold pace for elite runners to about 30 seconds slower than threshold pace for slower runners".

In page 35 there is a slight contradiction on the duration. The table states that the duration should be "up to lesser of 90 min and 16 miles"

The elite marathon training plan in pages 264-266 has not M runs that last 16 mies. For example, in one of the workouts, it calls for "2 miles (or 12 min) E pace + 6 miles (or 30 min)  M pace + 1 miles (or 4:45) T pace + 5 miles (or 25 min) M pace + 1 miles (or 4:45) T pace +1 mile (or 4:45) M pace + 2 miles (or 12 min) E pace.

None of the workouts I saw (and I didn't sift through the whole book, TBH) called for 16 miles or 90 minutes straight of running at M pace. 

Although Daniels says that some runners can substitute (occasionally) an easy run with a marathon pace run if they feel good, I don't think he said that M pace is not much harder than E pace. At least in my case, the difference between the E pace and the M pace is about a minute and a half. And IMO, that's huge. In fact, at that M pace, I'm actually hitting lactate threshold.

So is M pace always have to be the lesser of 90min or 16m then? I just started 5k-15k plan, and was going to do this at least one day to mix it up with E runs in Phase I. 15m most i was planning on running for entire cycle as using plan to train for 2 half marathons.

Not my intention to do anything but clarify, and I certainly have more familiarity with Daniels' book than its application:

 

2nd ed p102, referring to M pace: "This pace is not very strenuous when used for runs of even an hour or longer, and being faster than a typical easy run, the pace provides many runners with an alternative to an easy run on a day when conditions are good and going a little faster might even be a relatively comfortable pace. Naturally marathon runners will schedule this type of training more often and for longer durations than shorter-distance specialists will, but I encourage  the use of M runs as an occasional different stress for all runners. Most runners have days when things are just clicking, and a little faster than E-run pace (which might be M intensity) comes with relative ease."

Yeah, this is the section I had in mind when I made the thread. That first line - that it's not very strenuous when used for runs of even an hour - just seems crazy to me. Even completely rested, it would be quite tough, except maybe on a magical perfect day. But as others have suggested in this thread, I'm hoping that it will become easier for me once I adjust to the higher mileage. 

Love the Half - I see your point about adjusting the workouts to your own fitness levels, but 90 minutes at M pace for me would be just short of a half marathon (12.8 miles), and 90 minutes is my PR for the half. So it would be practically race effort. But I guess this is why it might be smart for me to subtract a couple of VDOTs for now! Though, as zonykel points out, maybe these M pace runs aren't necessarily continuous. It'd be a lot easier to do 90 minutes of M pace running split up into blocks of 20-30 minutes. 

I didn't see it mentioned yet, but the VDOT also assumes the equivalent times you could run if properly trained for that other distance.  Most ordinary folks have higher VDOTs based on their 5k time than their marathon time.  So determining your VDOT based on a short race, and then trying to hit the specified paces for long-race training, is a tall order.

I agree with this, and it is why I personally would use my half marathon v-dot value for marathon training, as opposed to my 5k value.

I am just not ready to use my 5k v-dot value for anything more than a half marathon at best. 

If however, I am ever able to extrapolate my marathon time from my 5k value and run that, I would be on cloud nine!