Marathon Pacing (Read 833 times)

Pick a marathon with pace teams. They are supposed to run relatively even miles for the entire race, so you could then just keep with them. Or. Buy yourself a Garmin or Nike+ pod thingee to keep your pace for you. Then you can check yourself against it to make sure you are not going out too fast.

thanks Jeff! I've tried the pacing teams and they are hit or miss. Sometimes they go out really fast trying to bank some time to cover themselves and make sure they get in on the marked time. Been thinking about the GPS thing... think I'm gonna try that. Much appreciated.

What mikeymike said. My experience after 20 marathons? You will always run a better marathon if you start slow, and plan for a negative split. Ever wear a pace band? It can help reel you in at the start, particularly when you feel as if the crowd is leaving you behind and want to keep up. And don't worry about how good you may feel at the start. If you feel good at the end, that's when you can pick it up. You can't 'bank' minutes. Never works. It's like getting an advance on a credit card. You've got to pay it back later with interest. Same thing with the 'minutes' you borrow up front on a marathon. My running partner and I train together every day. Same course, pretty much the same pace, etc. Every time we run a maraton, he starts too fast. Every time we run a marathon, he crashes and burns. A marathon, as I'm sure you have discovered, is a race of patience. Think slow, slow, slow, slow, fast.

I have only run 1 but here was my experience. I ran with my hr monitor. I know from running with it a short time that any time I go over 150 I am definitely approaching a pace I cannot sustain without my legs becoming lead... so I figured that point was around 156... so I attemped to try to keep my HR at about 150 and not let it climb... I did a good job of that from mile 4-16... let it jump a bit from 17-21 and paid for it in mile 22... I ran the second half of the marathon 7 seconds faster than the first half. I would say my pacing was about as good as I could do. For me I kept trending faster and the HR monitor was a good governor to tell me when to dial it back a bit. It also was a good reality check for when I thought things were getting tough... sometimes my HR had drifted up ... other times it had drifted down... I think I could have done the race without it but I think I would have not held such a consitent pace and I would have either not kept up with my pace or gone to fast and crashed...

Practice, practice, practice. Long runs help with this. The more you run, the better your sense of pace will be, the better idea you'll get as to how to pace it.

Scout??? Is that really you?

No. I'm a figment of my imagination.