Marathon Disaster - Thoughts?

My ambition definitely killed me in this one. I was trying to pack in race pace efforts during the last 6 weeks to build confidence. This was a great lesson that, unlike some things in life. More is not always better. Fitness =/ performance as I learned. Plenty of people less fit than me destroyed me in the race due to training smarter.

dang -reading through this makes me wonder what I am doing wrong (or right). Im late 40's and ran 2:46 off of 50mpw with a high of 60. Some of these workouts Im seeing I sure couldnt do (or more likely would be terrified of doing).

My initial thought is far too many miles for the talent level. My honest advice would be to do the 70 mpw plan again and follow it as closely as possible. If you want something different i quite enjoyed the Daniels plan with lots of broken tempos.

It's quite hard to overtrain (most get injured first) but it does look like you may have run that. Were your workouts / races better during this cycle than last ? From what I can glean of the description it looks like you very gradually broke down throughout this cycle and the relatively short taper wasn't enough to reverse the "beating down" effect of the training. My own experience was that I always made gains as I increased mileage but never got above 70-80 (largely in doubles) for a sustained stretch. And as it goes higher increases need to be more gradual. I'm with the "drop back to 70" crowd.

Might've missed it OP but what was the weather like for the race? It looks like you were ready for a small improvement (2-3min). Weather could definitely affect that. Your fueling looked good during the race. Maybe you were underfueled heading into the race.

Idk about doing 4 weeks of "speed" workouts at the end of the build. That doesn't make sense to me at a time when you should really be zeroing in on GMP. What was the reason for that? You don't see a lot of high level athletes doing that so close to a race.

Yes, workouts during this cycle were consistently 15-30 s/mile faster than last. I clearly made gains in fitness, then fell apart on race day.

For comparison's sake, most of my training during the last build was around 8 min/mile. This build was closer to 7:30 min/mile at the same RPE. I attributed this to me being "new" again for running and having high growth potential due to my aerobic base from cycling.

The goal of the speed work was to make goal MP feel easier. I identified high-end paces as a weekness and wanted to shore up that end of my fitness in the closing weeks, which was clearly a mistake.

I coach marathoners and have had some pretty good success in terms of consistent improvements.

Based off of your background and where you're currently at, I believe 90mpw might have been a bit too much to begin with. However, the big problem here was your taper in my opinion. My rule of thumb is 90% the week before and 80% the week of to prevent your body from becoming lethargic. Especially if you weren't compensating the taper with shorter speed work (for the marathon, it's 5k paced intervals).

I would consider starting at ~70mpw while focusing on 4 days of the week and supplementing the other days with easy recovery runs. A midweek long run, Short intervals at a faster effort, Structured long runs, and a complete easy day running no more than 4-6 miles. Strides the day before workouts too. A 16 week build of this will have you better off than cooking 90mpw. As you start getting better results, you can add 10-20% mileage to your next build and find that comfort zone on what you could recover from.

Hope this helps.

FWIW I just had the exact same thing happen to me this weekend. Marathon day was the biggest struggle I've had to maintain goal pace in like two months, and after mile 14 I couldn't get my heart rate anywhere near what I would normally maintain for a marathon. Training had seemingly gone perfectly and I never saw any signs of overtraining. Did the exact same fueling during the race as I've done in multiple successful marathons.

I spent the day after the race trying to analyze what went wrong, and so far I'm leaning towards the idea that it was many different things in combination. Headwind, humidity, lots of sun exposure on the course, too tiring of a travel day too close to the race, too short of a taper--even if no single one of these things would alone explain what happened, the cumulative effect of them potentially does.

If it's not broke don't fix it. IMHO, all you needed was a bit more of long haul speed work and leave the rest intact.

Back to the drawing board.

Yeah, it's pretty frustrating IMO. I think I just burned too many matches in training and ran too many miles. Came into the race trashed.

You did the equivalent of a 20 to 22 mile goal pace run! Thats way too fast. A Pfitz long run has the first half at 20% slower than goal pace and the second half at 10% slower. Your run could have taken 7 to 10 days to recover from. Did you overdo most of the other long runs too?

For my Pfitz training cycles the MLR was a big time commitment mid week but not a hard workout. It only took an easy day to recover. If you were replacing them 1 for 1 with speed work in the last 4 weeks you were adding significantly to your training load and wound up over trained.

Modifying Pfitz like this is like people modifying online cooking recipes, getting bad cookies instead of bread and being surprised.

I did something similar while training for the 2021 Boston Marathon by switching to my club’s Advanced marathon plan from the Intermediate plan about 8 weeks out before the race. I wound up borderline injured and overtrained. I wound up 15 minutes slower than my BQ time.

IMO the biggest value a coach can add is telling you not to do stupid things like adding intensity you’re not ready for.

Yeah seems like overtraining (mileage + intensity) is a theme here. Heart rate data seems in line with that. What about weather/pacing?

Generally, speed work comes early in the marathon build or pre-build. You can & should pepper in some "speed" work but maybe it's ~10k pace every few weeks or so (16-20 x 400 @ 10k on short rest). Maybe it's strides 2x/week or long strides (4-6 x 1:00 on/off 1x/week). When a lot of runners say speed they are doing short/fast reps @ VO2 (instead of the 16-20 x 400 @ 10k it's a weekly hard 8-12 x 400 or equivalent type workout), maybe even quicker. 4 weeks in a row when you should be hitting your MP specific sessions could have left you buried, especially when you were still trying to hit bigger long runs. Volume isn't there in those short workouts that close to a race. Marathon pace isn't going to feel easier if you overtrain, can't handle MP because you're not hitting specific MP workouts, or don't leave enough time to sequence through workouts so that you make adaptations. You might've been more ready to rip a 5k.

"I felt tired during this block, but chalked that-up to this being how I should fell, and completed all workouts." Training for the marathon is about 93% Aerobic. Why did you do so much speed and ignore the aerobics the last four weeks?

Do it right the next time and you will see much better results. For the most part, do less than you think you can get away with doing! That is unless you have some way to measure the pH in your blood. And even that is not totally foolproof.

No, that point was to illustrate that my race pace was very slow relative to my long runs. That 24 miler was not done at even close to race effort.

Sorry to hear that you learned the same as me. Just curious - how did you rebound in your next marathon?

It took me two more tries to get it right. I finally went back to the Pfitz 18/55, stayed healthy and got my BQ (-15 minutes) again. I’ve gotten 3 BQs out of 4 attempts with Pfitz. With my club’s plan I’m 0 for 4.

What I’ve learned is that I need to stay healthy by doing the workouts on my plan at my paces and regular strength training. Also, my club’s plan has faster, shorter workouts and not enough mid week longer runs.

Most marathon training is slow running! If you want to run fast then train for shorter distances like 5K, 10K or 10 miles. It’s fun to do that in place of a spring or fall marathon. Too many people, myself included, start training only for marathons and forget about the shorter distances.

I agree with this 100%. I once did Pfitz's 24-week plan and it was about 12 weeks too long, lol. With hindsight, I was ready to rumble in the 12-14 week range and was stale -- both mentally and physically -- by the time I got to race day.

Like "12 to 18" said, once you have enough of an aerobic background plus are moving from training block to training block (i.e., year-round training, esp over the course of some years), you just don't need that long a build-up. As far as I can tell, pro marathoners frequently, maybe even mostly, do a 10-12 week "build" into a marathon. Of course they're training all the time so the "block" is a change of focus not starting from scratch, but that's true for you too.