Marathon Training Scale-Back Weeks? (Read 797 times)

See, I just have the designated Boobie area. The sports bra holds up the HRM just fine. If I am ever pregnant, I will totally geek out with the HRM. I would totally want to know what the new stress does to my HR.

“Zoomy, I want you to look at my log and notice my current training paces. After you have done that I want you to look at my PRs and compare them to your own. Then I want you to ask yourself if you are in the same shape I am currently. If the answer is no, I want to ask you one question: What are you doing running at the same training pace I am? Slow down. I have a feeling most of your problems will go away once you slow down. You seem to be closer to the shape I was in about Sept./Oct. of '06. Look at my training paces then, that is close to where you should be doing easy runs pace wise.” Willamona; I’m a big advocate of running easy on our easy days, but I think you are over doing it by quite a bit. Your training pace is much too slow, imo. If you were doing more threshold work you might get by with it but you aren’t. Some longer intervals and/or tempos at 10k-HM pace would probably make a substantial difference for you . These aren’t even considered “speedwork” in the traditional sense and are not that hard to recover from. I hope you are at least doing strides. If I punch in your 10k or marathon times, both which were run recently, I get 9:00-9:20 as an easy pace for you. I applaud you on your steady mileage, btw. http://runworks.com/calculator.html http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/Running%20University/Article%201/mcmillanrunningcalculator.htm Zoom Zoom; I know this going to be like waving the red flag, but my biggest question for you would be why you want to persue the marathon. Why not wait until you can handle the training? I can understand you wanting to cut back because of the injury problem, but you really don’t have anything to cut back from. The peak mileage I see in your log is not nearly enough to do much more than survive a marathon. There are so many good runners how don’t run marathons. I’m not trying to give you a hard time. I just think it would be so much better for your running to work on getting over the hump with the injuries and building up your mileage before thinking about marathons.

Just my opinion Zoomy, but it's not like you just started to run and had some crazy thought about running a marathon; you've been running for years. You don't need to log 80 miles a week to run a marathon, you just need to pull together a solid safe plan and have the base miles to support your plan. You have that. As far as just "surviving" the marathon - well you won't run it in 3 hours, but you'll enjoy the experience and be proud of your accomplishment once you finish. Don't worry about doing every run and every mile of your training plan, but listen to your body and how you feel. You'll be fine.

I think 90 seconds per mile slower than MP is extremely slow for easy days that are not the day after a really hard workout. I also think the slower a person is the closer their easy pace will be to their marathon pace. And to the original question on cut-back weeks, I've never found a real need to cut back on mileage during a marathon buildup. I'll take weeks where I cut back on intensity and just run mileage, but I rarely see a need to intentionally cut back on mileage. As always, ymmv.

Willamona; I’m a big advocate of running easy on our easy days, but I think you are over doing it by quite a bit. Your training pace is much too slow, imo. If you were doing more threshold work you might get by with it but you aren’t. Some longer intervals and/or tempos at 10k-HM pace would probably make a substantial difference for you . These aren’t even considered “speedwork” in the traditional sense and are not that hard to recover from. I hope you are at least doing strides. If I punch in your 10k or marathon times, both which were run recently, I get 9:00-9:20 as an easy pace for you. I applaud you on your steady mileage, btw. http://runworks.com/calculator.html http://www.mcmillanrunning.com/Running%20University/Article%201/mcmillanrunningcalculator.htm

For what it's worth, 9mm is about what my easy pace is indoors on a treadmill in the a/c. Add hills and heat and pile on the minutes. I only do intervals/threshold stuff during my peak work. I will not be peaking anytime soon. I also did not ask for advice, and it is well known that I do not see eye-to-eye with Tinman and his training methods. Thanks anyway.

There is no cutback weeks in the program I'm following, however the once a week long run is cut in half every other week. eg. 16-8,18-9, 20-10,......so the weekly total does not rise every week.