Thursday, February 14, 2008

Marathon Pace 11.1ks

Pain, pain and more pain. I did three laps of the running track in Centennial Park tonight. The last one was not pretty, maybe I pushed it too hard. The breathing was out of control.

The three laps were 14:52, 14:49 and 14:34 to finish. So total was 44:15 for 11.1ks. Average pace of 3:59 per klm.
I'm not sure how much further I can go at 4 min pace as I'm really hurting doing this at the moment. Since I have not run a half marathon at 4 min/k pace it would be pretty out there to suggest I can do that in training. But I am proposing to run 42.2k at that pace in Canberra.
Mcmillan says no way, no how. Anyone else have any thoughts on the matter? Or where the blowup might occur?
I must be nuts!!!!!!

8 comments:

Tesso said...

Is it smack on 4 minute pace you want in Canberra? Or 'just' a sub 3hr marathon? That 15 seconds per km difference is huge.

Anonymous said...

If you don't try, you'll never know. Certainly all the accepted wisdom suggests you are trying the impossible but they would have said the same about Lydiard and Cerutty in their day. If it motivates you to train harder, keep it up, and possibly a couple of weeks before Canberra, time trial and see what you are capable off. Revise your goal then and you should be aiming at least under 3 hours. I will be interested to see how you go.

Will the Frenchman said...

Why don't you get the sub 3 out of the way first and go for 4mn/k at Gold Coast or Cities.

26miles said...

The key to running a good mara is to get your 10k times down. To run a 2.48 marathon you would need to be in sub 36 min 10k or about 79flat for 21.1k. It's possible if you do the right training but you need to be doing 6 x 1k reps at about 3.15-20 pace off 90 secs recovery or 5 x 2k reps in about 7 mins plus a good solid long run at 4.20-40 pace - no slower.
In my opinion - you do to much slow jogging - no one of your potential should be lolling around Centennial park at 5.15 pace - cut the run short if your tired and do some weights or core exercises instead. Have a look back at Vat's blog - he didn't waste a run.

Jen said...

What they ^^^^^ said ;-)

Anonymous said...

Strongly in concurrence with the Frenchman on this one. Why not make that elusive sub-3hr your interim goal and move forward from there.

JD

Ewen said...

The "slow jogging" that 26miles mentions is OK for some of your weekly miles - as long as you have hard sessions in there as well. I know some 2:40 marathoners down here who do some jogging at 5:15 pace or slower.

I'd say if you're not running sub-37 for a 10k race, you won't run 2:48. A training half in 84 minutes would be good. I ran LCP training in 84, but couldn't convert that to a marathon (not enough long runs).

If you go out at 4s and aren't capable of it, you'll end up like this.

26miles said...

I didn't mean don't do any slow runs, i meant 11-12k's when your tired is pointless, better to rest or just run for 30 mins or so on easy days.
It wasn't the training that stuffed Vat, it was his continued training thru some serious injuries that finally broke him - but heck, he got what he wanted !