Long is Short

The three marathons that I have run were very different from each other in the way I felt at the end, but one conclusion was the same -- "That was reeeeally far. "

OK duh, but the distance is SO far, that I'm not sure it's actually good for me. Don't get me wrong -- I fully believe that RUNNING is good for me, even the marathon training. But the event itself... ouch.

So this year, I'm on a mission to make the marathon shorter. I mean, every new distance was long the first time, right? These days though, when I finish a half marathon I'm tired from racing, not from running an endless distance. Why? Because I run 10 miles at least twice on the weekdays, and often run longer than 13.1 on the weekends.

The marathon is different, however. Conventional wisdom says peak at 20 or 22 miles on long runs, at at least a minute per mile slower than race pace. That means that on race day, you are asking your body to go 4.2 miles farther than any training run, and at a much faster pace. No wonder it hurts!

So why would anyone suggest such a strategy? The only reason I can think of is that running that far is not good for you, so you shouldn't do it in training. You should just get close enough that you can survive race day. Race day won't be good for you either, but you only do it now and again, so you can get away with it.

If, over time, I come to accept that theory, I'll stop running marathons. I don't want to abuse my body. BUT, I haven't accepted that theory yet. So here's what I'm trying.

I'm going to train up to the full distance. Today I ran 24 miles (22.45 in the park, and 1.5 to get there). It was my longest training run ever. I two weeks, I'll run the National Marathon as a training run, at about 45 seconds per mile slower than my target race pace. Four weeks later, I race Boston.

I recently ran the "shortest" 20 miler that I've ever run. Today's run was harder, but I should expect that -- it was the longest I've done. The idea is that as the milage comes up, I'll become fit enough to go the distance without abusing my body. Obviously, this theory can't be applied to any distance no matter how long, but so far, I'm optimistic.

To do this, I need to keep ramping up my other runs, because it's cheating to cut back in order to be able to stretch the long runs. The medium distances have to come up to match. We'll see how it goes....