Forums >Racing>2018 Sub-3. No rules. Run.
RIP Milkman
Kram - very nice work, I”m really interested to see how things go for you given your entire year. For me, I think the goal is just to get 6:20-6:25 on the flat sections and let the pace slow down as the bridges dictate. Trust me that I’ve thought about sub 2:45 but I think going out at 6:15 pace would be suicidial for me. And I really do have a love hate with Daniels. I started looking at his 71-85 plan for Boston because I think I’m ready to go up in distance, and my lord are those workouts impossible. I thought they would just be stepping up what I’m already doing, but he has crazy stuff in there like 15 miles, with 12 at MP and 3 at T. Can’t wait...
5K: 16:37 (11/20) | 10K: 34:49 (10/19) | HM: 1:14:57 (5/22) | FM: 2:36:31 (12/19)
Subdood: Congragts on gutting out the race. Takes a lot of mental fortitude to push through a race when feeling like that, especially the marathon. Take some time to really let your body recover from whatever you are fighting.
JMAC: Yup you are pretty much ready to roll. Stay away from those germs and enjoy the taper. That workout yesterday looked very solid and even more so with those high 6 pace miles after the quality work! Agree with you on those Daniels higher mileage plans. Feel free to trim back a bit of the quality, while keeping the volume up until you feel comfortable with all those MP and T miles. Some of those workouts can be nuts.
Kram: Very solid looking week. Been there a few times with the heavy meals the night before and they have usually involved pasta. I'm not a huge pasta loading guy anyways.
JT: Hope you are recovering from both the huge marathon PR and your surgery.
BGS: NIce week. Hope the leg feels better with the cutback.
Very happy with my week. Brought up the mileage to the highest it will be this cycle (almost 89) with 2Q days. First one went fairly well where it was still very muggy and was basically a repeat of a workout I did about 4 weeks where I ran 1200 meters with the first half uphill on our local bridge/causeway and the second half is downhill so there is really no flat section. Figured 4 was enough on that one! Hit my second big workout (3,2,1) yesterday running a cutdown threshold effort where I tried to speed up in each section averaging somewhere around current HM pace on the first 5K, then threshold pace on the next 2 miles, and finally just a hard mile in the last. First 5K felt pretty sluggish and hard, but got it going afterwards. Was able to add in another threshold mile after another 5 or so EZ miles so got in somewhere around 7 at HM pace or faster. Figure it was good to add this last one in when tired.
Plus the weather finally broke for us yesterday morning! Not cold by any means (low 70's so far), but we had dew points in the mid 50's this morning Have a 5K coming up on Saturday evening so will cut back a bit especially Friday if this weather holds. Then I'll have about 3-4 weeks to kind of target my HM goal pace which means most of the Q days will focus on threshold or a few seconds faster than goal pace - basically a Phase 4 block.
Weekly Summary Monday, Oct 15, 2018 thru Sunday, Oct 21, 2018
1mile: 4:46 (12/20) | 5K: 15:57 (3/21) | 10K: 33:40 (4/20) | 15K 51:43 (4/21) | HM: 1:15:03 (12/20) | FM: 2:40:30 (1/20)
Yeah , JMac you look very good to go.
SubDood - that's a respectable positive split considering you were trying to quit for more than half of it! In the prizes too, I'd say that was pretty decent day.
BGS - you're in fine form if that week is just running to feel, might be just the refresher you need.
Kram - good week, looking forward to seeing how you go.
my week : nothing much, bit of bike, walk, kettlebells, sauna, whisky, taking it easy. Started feeling good again so will probably do a workout this week
Upcoming; 14th Sep Scottish veterans XC trials, 289th Sep Great Scottish Run 1/2, 12th October TAMA half marathon, 27th October Leeds Abbey dash 10k
Subdood: Congrats on gutting it out and a great AG placing. I would say it was worth it just to meet Beardsley and hear him speak. You're right, he's been through a lot, some major highs and lows, and has a great perspective on life.
BGS: Another solid week. That Thursday session had just what you were missing, some nice fast miles. I think you'll be setting up nicely for your race.
Kram: Nice rounding out of your cycle and it will be interesting to see how Indy goes for you; I wouldn't count you out for a fast time there. Agree that you will be set up well now to dive into a monster cycle for your spring marathon.
JMac: Great last couple of workouts; now you can ease off and taper up for that sub 2:45!
Weather: Huge week! Glad to hear you'll be doing a 5k and excited to see how that goes. You're certainly setting up well for cutting a big chunk off your half PR, and a great base for a marathon cycle next year.
Finbad: Glad to hear your feeling better.
Thanks BGS, Kram and Weather for the well-wishes. Still feeling sore from the surgery but better each day. I got some great perspective from Bruce, a guy on Strava and in the RWOL sub 3 group; some of you may follow him. Anyway, he had double hernia surgery, also laparoscopic, last year and was good to hear how he came through it. He took 2 weeks completely off running per doctor's orders but then jumped right back into his Boston cycle. My doctor did not put a time on when I can start back, just that there should be no pain. So now that limits me to walking but hopefully soon I'll get back to slow easy running.
2:52:16 (2018)
JT - glad to hear you're feeling better and got some encouraging news. Also thanks for sticking around even post-surgery! 2 weeks off post race is fairly standard anyway so you won't be missing much. Also you're missing this jump right into late fall weather, what happened to those nice fall days with a high of 65? Anyway, do you have any exercises to do, or it's just basically sit around and wait until it's not sore anymore?
Weather - Another absurd week. I think you're the pace car in this thread for overall fitness level.
Fin - Whisky and resting, that sounds like what my 2 weeks post marathon training look like
Mmmm Bop
SubDood - Sorry to hear the race didn’t go to plan...but great RR and glad you enjoyed the experience overall. A 200m track marathon??? JMac thought I was crazy running 105 laps on a normal track! Would you be responsible for counting your own laps?
Kram - Agree that’s a solid week! Any goal time for Indy or just go by feel?
BGS - You could be the dark horse on this thread...banging on about feeling burned out and no motivation every week....but still consistently hitting 70+ miles!
Weatherboy - Great week and good luck with the 5k on Sat evening (that’s an unusual time for a race!)
JT - That’s great that you’re feeling better and you deserve a couple of weeks off anyway. 👍
My week...
Mon - 6.5 @ 7:13 (6x800 @ 2:56 average - 2min recovery)
Wed - 13.4 TM - 3x3 @ 6:26 (1 mile easy recovery)
Fri - 15.1 @ 7:48
Sat - 3.1 @ 5:56 (5k Parkrun in 18:29)
Total - 38.1
I’ve always considered myself a slowtwitch runner, but my 5k on Saturday was actually my highest AG % at any distance (81.06) I’m going to focus on shorter distance for the rest of the year and try to go Sub18 in December...then focus on the half Jan/Feb and then marathon March/April.
5k - 17:53 (4/19) 10k - 37:53 (11/18) Half - 1:23:18 (4/19) Full - 2:50:43 (4/19)
slingrunner - those experiments with that huge amount of caffeine sound wacky - but hey. maybe we all can learn from your experience.
SubDood - man, that one painful description of the marathon experience - looking for an exit for more than a half of a marathon? Strong focus and desire to finish is a part of a successful race - we all know that. Seriously, it's worth recognition you finishing that marathon, but I would not start it if I had no desire, even for friends who were definitely in a different state than you. There is no shame in not running a race when you are not in it. Hopefully I did not offend you - there is no such intent - but man, I felt the pain the whole way I read your RR.
weatherboy - that is some week - impressive. Of course I have no clue how old are - or I just forgot while I was absent. Still, even if you are under 40 - that kind of week I would like to have in a future (though, I would definitely make more singles
finbad - what happened? What did you miss that you didn't have any workouts this week?
JTReeve - wow man, if you ran that fast with those outstanding problems, it's hard to imagine what you will be capable of next year. What was the Bruce's nickname on RWOL? Good luck with the post-op recovery!
kram - still great week. With your experience you should know what to do to overcome all your doubt before upcoming race
JMac - I find it interesting that you guys trying to convince all people here that LT work is a must to get to best results. I kind of disagree on that as you probably noticed - I tend to trust more in mileage than into a LT workouts. But I strongly believe it's just an age difference between you guys and older folks like me. Doing all the high speed work increases chance of injury tremendously, imho, and recovering for such usually throws me away by weeks. At the same time - slow running is way less dangerous from injury point of view. Yes, it's much slower progress and you have to have tons of patience, but it works - I tested it. I also have a friend who is my age but much faster than me, 2:40 guy - his only speed workouts are races once a month maybe - all the rest are runs at 8:45-9:00 pace and he ran 2:45 in Boston this year (you know the conditions Boston had this year, right?) Not sure why I am telling this to you specifically, but I guess this also some kind of discussion with kram and JTreeves too. And BGS was asking questions about this also...
Mikkey - congrats on a pretty fast 5K - telling you as another slow-twitch guy It's impressive that you still feel a desire to go for a marathon PR next year. Very impressive, seriously. I don't feel any fire to go for it - you asked me previously - no, I am not planning on going for a PR - so, the court is your and you can beat my PR and be an undisputed champion . I am planning to finish this cycle and will decide from there. If I win WS100 lottery then things will change and I will have to have another 6 months of hard work. But if not, I do not know - I will surely have another 100K event in April-May - to keep me qualified for WS100, but other than that - no big plans.
My week:
Mon - 8.1mi @ 10:01
Tue - 13.5mi @ 9:04
Wed - 13.5mi @ 8:53
Thu - off
Fri - 13.5mi @ 8:40
Sat - 15.3mi @ 8:14
Sun - 17.1mi @ 8:16
Total: 81.2 miles
Regular week for me - some days felt bad, some better, Saturday was the best, kind of... I feel and see good progress, but will it come together by race day? That's an open question.
paces PRs - 5K - 5:48 / 10K - 6:05 / HM - 6:14 / FM - 6:26 per mile
Cal - I always love when you post because you're always disagreeing with me and it makes me think about my approach more. Let me clarify why I said more LT. Overall though, I agree with a lot of what you said. Warning to those who don't care - this is me just sort of spewing my own thoughts here on marathon training and as someone who has only run 2 of them, you can take them for what they're worth, aka nothing.
In my view, there are a few things that are very important to marathon training for the average person that they can control, i.e. excluding natural talent, age, etc. In order:
1) Miles per week
2) LT runs
3) Long run length
4) MP runs
Right away, you can see I pretty much agree with you that miles are the most important factor. Somebody running 60 MPW with tons of LT work is going to generally perform worse than someone running 100 MPW with zero quality work. They will also be subject to more injury as you stated.
However, holding miles per week constant, the next most important thing in my opinion is LT runs, not increasing your long runs, when you're already doing 22+. If someone was running 80 MPW with zero quality and 22 mile long runs, I think they would do MUCH better in the marathon if they added a LT workout to their weekly routine vs increasing that long run from 22 to 24.
All of that being said, it's pretty important to take your age and injury history into account. Obviously the older you are, the less quality work you can do. I would never tell a 55 year old that they should start running with Daniels 2Q. How could a 55 year old possibly recover at the same rate as a 25 year old in order to complete two big quality workouts per week? They can't, and I would modify the 2Q significantly or just abandon it completely and stick with your approach.
TL;DR - High mileage no speed is definitely a path to success, but adding in speed work is a better approach to training if you don't want to change your MPW than adding more miles to your long run.
Calbears - It’s great to have you back!
JMac: I wish I could be running these nice cool fall days, they are my favorite! As far as exercises nothing was ordered by the doctor, only thing is I am not supposed to do any heavy lifting for a month. I was able to walk on the mill at high incline today with no pain so that is a good sign.
Mikey: Great job on the 5k! That is an awesome age-graded result, and a fast time for any age. The plan to focus on shorter distances and speed and then transition to the half and then full sounds good; I will focus on a similar progression in training.
Cal: Interesting points about yourself and your 2:40 friend. I do recall some guys like that, who basically never do any speed or LT work, all the running is easy. But the one thing was they raced a lot. One guy in my area falls into this category. He runs almost every race in western CT, and claims he never runs anything other than slow easy mileage in between. In that case the races kind of substitute for speedwork. Did you do your training for 2:48 with only easy running? How often did you race shorter stuff during the cycle? I am certainly interested if it is possible to get good results with a minimum of hard workouts. Since I need such a long recovery after hard workouts, I end up doing them only once a week or less.
As far as the hernias hindering running, they were usually nothing more than a minor annoyance, sometimes giving hip area pain but not hindering running. But they will not get any better with time, and have the potential to give serious problems, so it was best to get them corrected. Especially after I had been putting it off and telling my wife "Just one more marathon and then I will do it" for the last 3 marathons.
JMac - I am not disagreeing with you, my training does. And I came to this kind of training with time - I basically chose distance over hard workouts. I tended to run high mileage weeks long time ago but never was 100% into only high mileage - always was trying to add LT or MP-10-15 secs sessions. But most of the cycles I was doing this were ending in some kind of injury - almost all of the times - hamstrings injuries. And as soon as you get a hamstring injury - my training is suffering and it usually throws you away by several weeks. I bailed out of two marathons because of this and ran Boston 2015 very unprepared (and unmotivated). And again - I actually agree with you that if you compound high mileage training and a hard workout at least once a week, that would be great and better than just a slow high mileage training. But it didn't work for me many times and with that kind of training there is such a thin edge which hard to catch - one moment you run sub 6 minutes miles and next day you out with an injury - because you were not supposed to run that fast and you didn't feel that condition. So, sorry to disappoint you but I agree with you actually, but just generally, not specifically
JTReeves - I race very rarely - maybe one race before a target marathon - usually prefer HM 4 weeks before a marathon. Do not race very often. And I don't wanna look like I found something that nobody found before. There are too many to name, but one of the examples would be the guy who "invented" Moose Mug award - the guy from old old RWOL days - 2007-2008 maybe. I think his name is Ray. Ray had kind of his own way of training - every day he was running a 9-10 milers at a pace of around 9 mpm and then once per week he ran up to 13 miles (by the end of the cycle) at an MP pace and another week he would run an LR (20 miles) at a pace of MP+20 secs. But most of his miles were at 9 mpm. He ran 2:41 marathon at the age of 49 and few in low 2:40s before and after 40 yo. He got a Lyme disease and that stopped his running career. But since then I liked his approach and tried to follow it as much as possible but with my own tweak of adding more slow miles (i also never ran 20 miles at MP+20). Interesting that what I see now Ray was basically running some kind of modified Hansons plan - seems very close to that.
In my case I started just like a regular runner - two Pfizt cycles at the very beginning, then quite a few Hansons cycles (I would say too many of them . For my PR marathon I followed Pfitz plan from his latest book - Faster Road Racing: 5K to Half Marathon. I liked his HM high mileage plan so much that I decided to follow it and, btw, it had 5 or 6 sessions at LT - something like 22 mins at LT, few minutes at a recovery (low 7 mpm) and then another 18 mins at LT. Those were pretty tough. I also added 5-6 miles to his LRs over the weekends and ran them on a slower side - without following his recommendations. I was lucky enough to have the whole cycle without injury and I was probably in the best shape of my life - but those were 100+ miles weeks and plus some LT during the week. My HM PR is also from that cycle.
But I need also to say that exactly a year before this PR, I had a fall where I ran mostly 8+ minutes miles without much speed workouts at all - maybe few 6-8 miles sessions at MP by the end of the "cycle" (that schedule was due to another hamstring injury) and I ran 2:51 at the same course. Last year I didn't run much and only decided to start training in August - so, I had no ability to train even at MP pace - so I ran all the miles at 8-9 mpm, ran 1:28:35 HM 3 weeks before target marathon and then ran 2:59. This year I started to train in September, by now I only ran one 7mpm mile (yesterday and will have HM again 3 weeks before marathon. I run much slower this year than last year (I think mostly to the fact I didn't 1 mile during summer) but my mileage is higher than last year - so, that will be interesting to observe when this experiment ends on Dec 2.
Anyway, just trying to share my experience that you don't need to run a lot of quality miles to be relatively good at a marathon - if you like music and a lot of slow miles (as finbad said - tantric style :-) - you can do pretty good (and my wife also says my body transforms to a human shape again
Mikey - you mean conversation wise? Sure, many old timers know I can argue a lot and they say it's impossible to convince me. Which is total lie...
Mikkey - 81.06 AG% is no joke, great run.
Cal - very pleasing looking week with the pace gradually dropping and distances stretching.
JT - speedy recovery.
Weatherboy - really good looking week again
Sorry if I gave anyone the impression I had major problems, just taking some easy time and fixing niggles as I've nothing to train for. It's kind of tricky to post up a weekly when you're kicking back but I'm trying to keep regular with my posting.
Cal - Agreed there are multiple ways to attack this race. Always good to debate a bit though. Injury history though is a unique thing: some people get injured because of intensity, some get injured because of MPW (although most are a combo of the two). However, finding what works for you is most important, and certainly if you're getting hamstring injuries with intensity, makes sense to cut back. Probably one of the worst types of injuries to get for running, they never seem to go away.
Mikkey - Your AG times are absurd. Really impressive stuff. I'd have to go 2:33 in the marathon to reach 80%, and I think that before Kipchoge set the new WR
Fin - Thanks for still posting even if you're just kicking back!
Cal: Thanks and I'm 38 so not quite up to 40 just yet. I started running pretty late in the life (almost 30 or so) so my lifetime mileage might be a lot lower than some.
JMAC, Cal and JT: Like the discussion about training and what works best for folks here. I feel like with the Daniels 2Q type plan and the mileage I have been running since about last summer I've been able to make huge gains in the longer stuff. Big question is how sustainable my training regime is over multiple cycles. Though once I race my half in a few weeks I'll be shutting it down for about a week and then will pick up the EZ mileage before jumping into my Boston cycle come late Dec. I certainly think a period of resetting is important the more quality you include.
Looking like I won't be racing my 5K this weekend as my wife's grandmother passed away last night It was sort of expected (age), but never easy for anyone involved. To make matters worse my in-laws were visiting us when it happened so they had to catch a flight up north (Buffalo area) this morning and we will be making travel plans come another day or two once plans are finalized. Figures as our weather was looking so good to give a go, but family is more important. I may try to find a hometown race, assuming it does not conflict with anything going on with the family or just find another race here the following week since I really wanted to test out my fitness with the change in weather. And I was asking for some cooler weather, but I may be going straight into winter up there
Weather - Sorry for your loss. Always good to take some time with the family. You are going to be in for quite a shock up in Buffalo though. We've been having below normal temperatures here, and even our average would feel rough. You're going to have to run in a winter parka with how little acclimation you have.