Forums >Racing>What's a good strategy for pacing oneself on hills during a marathon (versus flats or downhills)?
Good Bad & The Monkey
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Kings Canyon NP 07'
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As long as the weather cooperates and you can run a smart race, you are gonna ROCK!
Various 'race time predictors' predict I can run something like a 3:17 or 3:18, but I realize those things are only accurate if your running a flat fast course with the wind at your back when the temperature is 50F the entire race, and everything else falls your way and you run a perfect race.
I don't know what your training has looked like, but race time predictors are most accurate for those running 70+ miles/week and less so for those running lower mileage. See http://mysite.verizon.net/jim2wr/id70.html.
"Mileage" is the average weekly mileage I ran during a 16 week period preceding the marathons, which generally was in the 40-47 mile range.
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Hey Jim: I found that article really interesting and helpful and I intend to use it in coming weeks to pick a realistic marathon goal for next month. I actually have a goal in mind but may have to adjust it (there's a small wager in play) so I really don't want to over extend and blow the race. I'll run a 10k time trial soon to get a more accurate idea of where I am. But the one thing I didn't understand was what exactly to base your weekly mileage on. Admittedly, I skimmed parts of the article, so I may have missed it. But what exactly does "mileage" mean? Average miles over the course of the entire preceding year? Average training miles during some specific pre-race period? Or is it peak weekly mileage prior to the race? Which mileage do I use to pick the ratio you discuss? MTA: Never mind. Just found this: So average the preceding four months or so?
Jim, your article on marathon pacing was very interesting. It definitely makes sense to me to include the extra variable of ‘training intensity’ to ‘correct’ the race time predictor times. I've only run one marathon (last Nov), and I started out way too fast and as a result I hit the wall after about 19 miles. So my final time, I’m pretty certain, was much slower than it would've been if I'd run a smarter, even paced, race. Even still, when I calculated my ratio it was 4.85 (I used a 15k time that I'd run about 3 weeks before the marathon, and converted it to an equivalent 10k time as suggested in your article to calculate the ratio). My mileage per week wasn’t high either (about 35 mpw), since my training was disrupted for a period of about 2-3 weeks in the 16 weeks prior to the race. It was more like 50 mpw the 8 weeks before the taper though. Anyway, although this is an experiment of 1, it appears that my ‘personal ratio’, like yours, might turn out to be something closer to what the race time predictors use (i.e., 4.6 to 4.7) than would be suggested by Brian’s table. I guess my upcoming race will give me my second data point!
By the way, it seems to me that two other key factors for accurately predicting a marathon time are 1) course difficulty and 2) weather (mostly temperature and wind). Seems like there should be an algorithm that can take the elevation profile of a course and estimate a correction factor! Wouldn’t it be cool if all (or some) of the huge amounts of data in this website’s database could be used to develop a new calculator….someday maybe….
Remember, these predictors aren't precise, partly because of the many variables that come into play. You might be interested in an early (1973) attempt to correlate marathon performance to several variables, including total mileage during the 8-weeks immediately preceding the marathon....http://mysite.verizon.net/jim2wr/id53.html. At least, I found it to be interesting. I heard from the original author a couple of years ago. He said that he liked my analysis of his article.
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