Forums >Racing>Is Boston really a fast course?
I look my best blurry!
It's faster and much easier than the Monkey!
You were a lot better prepared for Boston than Monkey!! ;o) Happy Thanksgiving.
True. I don't really recommend my 4 mos of PF as base building and 8 days from boot and crutches to 26.2 plan. Haha!
Queen of 3rd Place
(slight threadjack) You be crazy! How's your PF hold up in the hills? Strangely, the hills helped my ever-slightly-irritated upper hamstring tendons, so I'm curious if the terrain changes were good for you.
Thanks for the comments. I don't think flat is necessarily all that. I learned that at Chicago, the crowding into the turns (well, and the humidity) really killed me. Hot sticky people trying to hit the same apex at slightly different paces when you're running gonads-to-the-wall = ugh.
bhearn I'd love to hear your strategy for pacing Boston.
Nobby I'm using your program. I plugged in my numbers and I am scared!
Ex runner
Good Bad & The Monkey
That is because one cannot prepare for the Monkey...
I'm running somewhere tomorrow. It's going to be beautiful. I can't wait.
Poor baby
Options,Account, Forums
What are you talking about? I thought you had a whole alcohol thread dedicated to drinking, that was all about preparing for the Monkey?
It's a 5k. It hurt like hell...then I tried to pick it up. The end.
All I do is drink and get slower so I figure I could probably run the monkey tomorrow.
Oh yeah, drinking is def the way to prepare for the monkey, once you go into the dt's and you know that keg is a-flowin' you WILL get your sorry self to the finish!
A Saucy Wench
The most important part of monkey drinking training is to get yourself used to drinking first thing in the morning...or stay up all night drinking. Because if you arent drunk at 8 a.m. central, 6.am pacific on August 1st you might sensibly talk yourself out of registering.
I have become Death, the destroyer of electronic gadgets
"When I got too tired to run anymore I just pretended I wasnt tired and kept running anyway" - dd, age 7
You have an excellent point, in fact, alcohol is why I signed up for American River, my buddy called me during happy hour and told me the race was almost full and he was watching it fill online as we spoke and I better register NOW GO GO GO! Five minutes later I was all, like, FML.
Nonsense. One cannot *train* for the Monkey. Didn't I prove that the best way to prepare is to run a 100 miler the prior weekend?
In general, the plan is: negative split. Run the first half easy, pick it up a bit at the half, but save energy for the hills (M16-21). At M21, let 'er rip. The advantage of this approach is that you are very unlikely to blow up. If you don't have enough left to pick it up at M21, then be thankful you didn't go out even faster. If you do... you'll be flying past everyone else, which is a blast. I'm also convinced you give up little if anything vs. running even to slightly positive splits: my Boston results are in line with or slightly faster than most pace calculators predict based on tune-up races.
More specifically, what I did is this.
1. Go to one of the many sites that generate Boston-specific pace bands, and generate some mile splits. E.g., this one. I don't remember the one I originally used. Goal time doesn't matter. Put these splits in a spreadsheet. Now you basically have elevation-adjusted mile splits. At least, my impression is that most of these sites simply weight each mile by elevation-graded difficulty. The thing is, to run Boston well you need to take the global course profile into account. You can't just say, even effort per mile. So...
2. Next, reweight these splits for an overall even first-/second-half split. (Almost certainly, the splits as-is will have a significant positive split.)
3. Pick a realistic goal time, call it X. Add some small time to it, around 0:20 - 0:40 This will be your negative split. Reweight all your splits so they add up to X + your negative split.
4. Now manually reweight the last 5 miles to subtract off your desired negative split. You'll make it up on the big downhills here.
Voilà!
This was my sub-3 paceband for 2009, generated as above. I hit all the splits within 5-10 seconds, and ran 2:59:38. Oh -- I also manually put in a slow start, because of the start congestion. YMMV depending on which corral you're in.
That is very detailed! I'm impressed that it has worked so perfectly. Were you able to do this the first time you ran Boston, or did it take you a couple of tries to dial it in? There's a lot of variation among the miles due to the hills, I'm really amazed that you could stick to that.
Feeling the growl again
Bhearn's pacing strategy makes sense....look at what the successful elites do, it's often similar for those that are successful.
That said, it still doesn't mean that Boston is faster than a flat course.
"If you want to be a bad a$s, then do what a bad a$s does. There's your pep talk for today. Go Run." -- Slo_Hand
I am spaniel - Crusher of Treadmills
Thanks for the splits, If I decide to go and run Boston next year I will save this and maybe I will do another 2:59:50
No, my first Boston, 2005, I just used a Boston pace band from one of those sites. Or maybe it was printed by Nike at the expo, I forget. Anyway I paced for 3:09 and ran 3:43. It was hot. I had never run in the heat before. In 2006 I paced for a 2-minute negative split and ran a 2-minute positive split.
After that, I had this pacing strategy dialed in, and it's worked perfectly every time. I'm pretty anal about pacing; people make fun of me for how often I check my Garmin. I find it an effective mental strategy as well, though; I always have numbers to focus on to keep my mind off how much farther I have to run. There's always a bit of real-time math involved, because generally I won't hit the splits exactly, and the Garmin pace readout will be a tad optimistic. So after every split I compare the time to the target split, adjust the upcoming target split to compensate, then subtract ~5 sec. for Garmin optimism to get the next mile goal pace. What can I say, I'm a geek. It works for me.