Precious Roy wrote:
Tadese still runs a lot of halfs and still wins some pretty big ones. I wonder whether he ever really went all in with his marathon training. It has always seemed as though he just shows up at marathons to collect the appearance fees and then drops out in time to save his legs to race a half in a month or two.
I feel like this is the answer. You have to go all-in to train for the marathon. Essentially you have to fundamentally retrain the energy systems of your body towards glycogen sparing. When someone is world class at the shorter distances and an unknown at the thon' of course they're not gonna dive in entirely. The shorter races are what's making him his money, so of course he's gonna balk at compromising that with marathon training that will have an unknown outcome. I feel like he only made the jump to the marathon because there's a lot of money there and he was just kind of hoping that he would pop one off without changing too much in his training.