What did you do in training and how much did experience contribute to your five minute plus drop in time when five months later you won the Los Angeles Marathon in 2:08:24?
WK: Whenever I think about it I can’t put a finger on what I did differently. I just went back home and did what I do on my runs. I don’t have a program or schedule that says what I must do. I just wake up and go for a long run or go for a tempo run. I just kept doing the same thing – but faster. I do many of the same things as in college but the long runs are faster and faster and the tempo runs are faster and faster. For those first two marathons and all of my marathon races since then, I would go for 20-mile runs in training and try to reduce the entire time. I don’t believe I need to run one mile faster while another may be slower – the cumulative time is important. So every time when I do a 20-mile long run I might decide to go one or two or three or even five minutes faster to prepare me for my next marathon.
GCR: Since you were new to marathon running, were you paying attention to your split times in those first two marathons or were you more concerned with relative effort and running comfortably fast?
WK I would run for effort. My coach always told me to see how fast I could make it comfortable. In a marathon if you can take off only one second a mile you can run a big PR.
Let’s discuss your current training starting with your base building phase. Since you are racing two marathons per year, for how many weeks or months do you focus on building strong mileage and what is the highest you can sustain comfortably?
WK I don’t pay attention to miles. What I am running now I can’t tell you because I don’t keep records. It’s more based on effort. What is more important to me is the effort at which I run every time. I listen to my body. Sometimes I will run the entire week without taking a rest day; sometimes I’ll take one day or two days off. I might feel like I am so tired that I need to take some days off. So there is an up and down with how much I run. When it is two weeks before a marathon I still train like usual the whole week. In my current training two weeks ago I took no days off and ran 16 miles on one day and 20 miles on another day. Then last week I took two days off. Now this week I have already taken one day off. It goes up and down according to how my body feels and I’m trying to enjoy the training. I don’t do anything crazy.