Forums >Running 101>McMillan's "new" paces
A Saucy Wench
This is confusing to me because the easy runs in your log before Boston 2010 were the same pace as your marathon...
I was recovering from an injury and didnt train for boston. And I spent the first 18 miles of boston trying not to puke on the course.
My last real marathon was portland 2008
I have become Death, the destroyer of electronic gadgets
"When I got too tired to run anymore I just pretended I wasnt tired and kept running anyway" - dd, age 7
I don't really agree that easy runs are the least important part of training.
Neither do I, that's why I never said that. But how fast we're doing them might be, at least for most of us. I think there is a fairly wide range of paces you can hit on your easy runs and still get the right training response, since the primary purpose of easy runs is building our aerobic base while letting us recover for the hard days.
Almost all of us know the answer if we want to get faster: Run more, and do bigger workouts. In order to do those two things, most of the people on this board would actually have to slow down on their easy days. There's low hanging fruit all around us, and it's not in nitpicking our easy pace. Once we've gotten to the level where we're doing the other 99% of things that elites are doing (like running 140 miles a week with 3 workouts for starters) it might make sense to put the same level of analysis to our easy runs.
However, for kicks I calculated my "Salazar" Easy pace using the 69.7 to 73.8% of 5K race pace formula that heatherruns worked out. I get 7:29 to 7:54 per mile based on my best recent 5k....that's pretty close to what I do now (maybe I go a little slower when I'm tired or wearing five layers of clothes because it's 7 degrees out.)
That actually sounds reasonable and is a fairly huge difference from the McMillan Easy pace, which for me comes out to 6:39 to 7:38. So I stand by my original position that the McMillan easy paces are whack, and should be ignored.
Runners run
Why is it sideways?
I was recovering from an injury and didnt train for boston. And I spent the first 18 miles of boston trying not to puke on the course. My last real marathon was portland 2008
Okay, well if we all take our absolute PR marathon pace, the vast majority of the time it's going to be really hard. I can agree with that.
Mikey's post is good, especially the first paragraph.
What drove this thread was my claim that for slower runners marathon pace can be more or less easy pace. I still claim that there is a point X where the duration of a race is such a challenge that you more or less run your easy pace. I can be convinced that this point X is not at 4 or 5 hours but at 6 or 7 hours or 19 or 20 hours if you are Dopplebock (but despite all the hand waving and percentage calculating I don't really think that it's all that different from 4 or 5 hours, and there are a million training logs that prove this.) But I think that's different from saying that all 4 or 5 hour marathers should be running at MP every day. Obviously there will be recovery days and days where you feel like crap, but every now and then, I'd imagine a 6 or 8 mile run at MP might not feel so hard. Call me nutso.
Easy runs should be run by effort. I guess my big thing is that for some runners they MIGHT consider running a base phase where they "get after" it on easy days without running hard. My suspicion is that as soon as people start doing this, they would rather call those runs tempo runs or steady state runs or whatever and then start calling the runs where they are tired recovery days. Fine. Then it's a semantic argument.
In the end, though Mikey is totally right that no one should go out trying to hit X pace on their easy days. Hell, I don't even wear a watch on my easy days, most days. You can see how often I do by looking at my log.
I think McMillan's calculated easy run pace is too fast, and my opinion really matters since I'm an expert on easy run pace!
Age: 50 Weight: 224 Height: 6'3" (Goal weight 195)
Current PR's: Mara 3:14:36* (2017); HM 1:36:13 (2017); 10K 43:59 (2014); 5K 21:12 (2016)
Dream Maker
Okay, since I typed out several paragraphs several times and it won't let me post because Running Ahead has clearly become self aware and is acting in self preservation... bullet points.
Are we there, yet?
I suspect this is implicit in some of the comments so far, but I'm not certain anyone has explicitly made this point: easy run pace and easy runs are not synonymous. A long run at an easy pace is not an easy run. It becomes a long run with McMillan paces showing a correspondingly slower pace range. This would fit with the contention that there is a duration or distance at which easy pace and race pace are equal, a point probably well beyond when running at an easy pace was still an easy run.
2024 Races:
03/09 - Livingston Oval Ultra 6-Hour, 22.88 miles
05/11 - D3 50K 05/25 - What the Duck 12-Hour
06/17 - 6 Days in the Dome 12-Hour.
wc, you're looking to run an ultra?! I thought you were more of a middle-distance track type guy.
Yes, and I am. In fact I have a track meet tomorrow where I plan to run the mile and 800m. I got intrigued last year by reports from friends who either ran or crewed at Badwater. I joined the crew from RWOL BF at NC 24 last fall to see first hand for myself what it was like. After several months of consideration I decided a timed event would be a good intro and exposure to an area of running I've never considered before.
Consistently Slow
Nope. What I said was that between 4 and 5 hours race pace gets close to easy training pace. But if you want to keep pretending I look down on slower runners, be my guest.
You are right, at least for me. My 5:09 @11:34 pace at Disney is my easy run pace. I never ran McMillan paces in training to BQ. Paces were too fast.
Run until the trail runs out.
SCHEDULE 2016--
The pain that hurts the worse is the imagined pain. One of the most difficult arts of racing is learning to ignore the imagined pain and just live with the present pain (which is always bearable.) - Jeff
http://bkclay.blogspot.com/
This whole MP thing by just goes back to effort vs time.
Take your traditional tempo run, which is often said to be a little faster than half marathon pace. This holds ture for alot of runners but not for those at either end of the continuom. If you can run a half in 59 minutes, running for 25-30 minutes at a bit faster than half marathon pace is going to be darn near race effort. On the other hand if you are a two hour half marathoner then to run around half marathon pace is similar to like 1:45-2:00hr race pace, which is drastically different than the classic "hour race pace" people like to say for tempos.
So what we have going on here is easy pace, which is we wanted to classify it would technically be "X Hours race pace". What the value may be for X is up for debate, but for those saying marathon pace is close to easy pace they are suggesting X likely falls in that 5-6 hour range.
Ontopic: The faster 2/3 or so of the McMillian easy pace would definitely be too fast for me on most days, but I might get down close to there at the end of an easy run where I am feeling great, as to me easy is about a certain rhythmn and feeling, generally one where you are just in the groove your body wants to go on that day. At the end of a good run that can get decently quick. I'd venture to guess my typical easy run pace average is somewhere near the slowest end of his given paces.
They say golf is like life, but don't believe them. Golf is more complicated than that. "If I am still standing at the end of the race, hit me with a Board and knock me down, because that means I didn't run hard enough" If a lot of people gripped a knife and fork the way they do a golf club, they'd starve to death. "Don't fear moving slowly forward...fear standing still."