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Survey: Half-Marathon vs. Marathon Pace (Read 668 times)

va


    Have you run a half-marathon within the 3 month period preceeding a marathon? How many seconds slower was your marathon pace? For example, Jeff mentioned in another thread, his marathon pace was ~20 seconds slower.


    Why is it sideways?

      Good question. It seems like it would be important to know paces...for me it was 5:42 (a month before, training through) and 6:03 (tapered and rested). As Stephen said, ~20s difference, or 1.06*HMP = MP.
        20 seconds is probably best case scenario for most of us. And since the marathon is much easier to screw up or to be screwed up by weather or other events, you'll see a lot of folks with spreads much bigger than that. In fact I think with the vagaries of when and where you'll have a great day, it's pretty rare to nail a really good half and the perfect marathon in the same block of training. Jeff had a pretty sick season in the spring of this year. I've only done a half within 3 months before a marathon twice, and one of those times it was 86 degrees on marathon day. But my best result among that tiny sample was a 40 second spread. Though I'm 50/50 on doing a half in two weeks, which would be 2 weeks before my goal marathon and would give me one more data point.

        Runners run

          Half 8/13/2006 7:50 pace Full 10/22/2006 8:00 pace Half 5/5/2007 7:40 pace Full 6/16/2007 8:00 pace I may not make a good example, though, because I believe I underachieve in my half-marathons.

          How To Run a Marathon: Step 1 - start running. There is no Step 2.

            I've only done it once. It was 20 degrees on marathon day and I was sick, and the spread was 43 seconds.