xel wrote:
> Are you very light? What's the inspiration for your training plan (which basically entails packing 50% of your volume and 100% of your intensity into your weekly long run)?
I'm actually 15 pounds above when I ran the 1:10 HM. And even then I didn't think I was "elite athlete" lean. I will be trying to slowly lose the weight over the next year. I have put on some upper body muscle mass that I'm okay with parting with as I chase PR's for a period of my life.
For the one workout a week thing, I felt like I needed workouts that stressed my muscles, as that felt like a weak point in my other marathons. I probably had the aerobic fitness to be running 2:45's or low 2:40's for some of them, but especially my posterior chain and all my running muscles in general were breaking down before I got to the finish. For one of them I was doing the "easy threshold" training and felt confident in sub-2:40 then, but my body suddenly failed at mile 18. So I took the opposite approach and wanted to get a huge muscular stimulus on a weekly basis. And I knew I'd need a long time to recover so I didn't even try to do anything significant the rest of the week.
> I ran my 2nd marathon in 2:37 on 35 MPW. I never did well with high mileage.
Nice man. People like us do exist!
> If you're legit and not running this race hopped on some kind of dope... try to do 2:38 and the bonk will hit you well before 20 miles
Not doping. I already ran it. 2:38 is in the books. But in a way you are exactly right, as I tried sub 2:40 in one of the other marathons I ran and blew up before mile 20. I attribute the difference to doing the long runs with hard tempos and weight training to shore up my posterior chain.
> Eventually I bet you could add a second threshold workout per week, or maybe shift to a 2 week cycle and try to do 3 workouts in that space instead of two.
2 week cycle is smart. Those are good suggestions. I definitely hope to build up to a more normal training routine. Just gonna really take my time with it this time around. I want to keep good records of what I'm doing so I can be sure that the training is increasing. But I think it's also smart to just skip or downgrade workouts when I feel like it. If my performance progress stalls AND the records show I've been skipping so much that my training isn't increasing anymore, then I'd figure out which days I want to force. I want to feel really fresh at least every 3 weeks or so, as assurance that I'm not accumulating fatigue and heading toward overtraining. I can't purposely have tired legs for weeks on end like some people do. Maybe in a few years I can get there.
> Could he also have had a soccer/other sport background that served as a lifetime base? Running 2:38 off of 38-40 mpw is wild. Or he simply could be very gifted.
My youth running career had some great results off low mileage - I was recruited to div 1 NCAA etc. Just another story of "showed a ton of potential and then crashed and burned." I'm sure there are a lot of people like me but they never get back to running as an adult. TONS of talented high schoolers get destroyed in college.
> I will bet the honest answer is you ran in college
I had written up my youth career but deleted it because the post was getting so long already. Here you go:
In HS I ran 48.9 400m, 1:53 800m, 4:21 1600m, 9:43 3200m, 14:59 3mi, 15:46 5k. I took summer breaks and winter breaks off and did about 30mpw in-season. So the XC times (3mi and 5k) were from ~3 months of training after coming back from summer break. Since winter break is much shorter than summer, I'd start track in better shape than XC. 1:53 800m was at the start of my junior year (February?) but then some health issues prevented me from ever improving that (continued throughout Sr year). 9:43 3200m was a sit-and-kick race as a sophomore -- I was probably good for ~9:30 in a time trial type race as a sophomore. 48.9 400m was my Sr year when I had health issues (low energy), but I could still manage sprint training, so I shifted to focusing on the 400m. If I hit the weight room and did proper sprint training for 4 years, I think I could've been a lot better at 400m. Obviously I could've been a lot better at 800m-5k if I ran year-round and built mileage.
I ran my freshman year in college, promptly overtrained and burned out. Never ran a PR in college, though I did have some sick workouts. It'd be fair to say I got in better shape but missed the chance to prove it in a race. My youth career obviously shows a ton of potential (or at least it shows a similar ability to run good, but not elite, races on low mileage). As far as not mentioning years of training establishing a huge aerobic base, that's not the case. As I truthfully said, the 1:10 HM and low 15's 5k's were my best distance PR's. I'm 38 now, so I was 33 in 2019. The majority of my 20's was no exercise at all. Without training, I thought it'd be easy to run a 1:30 HM at one point and after 8mi or so I had to walk the rest of the way in complete agony. So a touch of training does make a huge difference. In my early 30's I started training regularly to head toward the 1:10 HM.
> You could have just titled it "2:38"
You don't get extra credit for doing less.Not going for EC. Obviously we are the minority but the fact is people like me exist and we overtrain very easily. Normal training guidelines are bad for us. When you're really motivated and feeling good it's hard to hold back and trust that you're building fitness. So I just wanted to share for my people.
To keep yapping: consider the marathon vs the tour de france. A one day event vs a multiday event. Even though the marathon is an endurance event, it's very different in nature than a multiday endurance event. Some people are a lot better at one than the other.
So say I'm a 10/10 genetically for running a fast single race, but I'm a 3/10 genetically for running fast every day for two weeks. Compare to someone else who is 3/10 for a single day event, but 10/10 multi-day. I'm gonna run a faster marathon because that's what I'm better at. And that faster marathon time is going to "dictate" faster training paces than them. But I'm worse at performing day after day than they are!
This is the predicament that I think people like me are in. We train light and overperform, and instead of saying "wow that training was so effective for me! let's keep doing it!" we say "wow I did so well even though I didn't even train properly. let's take this seriously and train properly now!" Boom, overtraining.
> Nobody should read this & think a 2:38 is achievable on less than 40mpw. That's not feasible for most runners targeting that kind of a time.
100% agree. Not general advice here. I'm hoping to help people like me or, outside of being helpful, just sharing an unusual training log. Next year is Chicago and CIM. I don't want to think of a specific goal time but yes I should make a huge leap if everything goes well and blow by the 1:10 HM. It'll be exciting to tread new ground at that point.
Thank you for the extra details