Vermont City Marathon (on low mileage training) (Read 384 times)

This weekend I ran the Vermont City Marathon in Burlington. It's a very nice course and well-organized. Plus Burlington seems like a great town. This was something of an experiment for me. It was my third marathon, but it's been six years since the previous one. I decided to try a three-day-a-week, relatively low-mileage high-intensity training program (based on this). I finished in 3:41:44. My previous marathons were Marine Corp 2000 (3:43:18) and Cape Cod 2001 (3:31:23). For both of those I did about 40 mile per week training, as opposed to 25-30 mile per week this time. So I would say that yes, you can run a comparable marathon on less mileage. But I didn't really enjoy the training as much this time, and toward the end I was feeling a little mentally burned out from the speedwork. On the other hand I did stay quite healthy, with no aches or injuries. The abundant rest days help with that. Up until mile 21 I was running pretty steady 8:00-8:30 miles and feeling reasonably comfortable, after that I bonked pretty bad, which was not unexpected. I think I ran a more disciplined race this time than the previous ones, probably because I paid a lot more attention to pacing during my training. So now I'm looking forward to a summer of long slow distance. It will be a nice change, and hopefully I can build a monster aerobic base.