High Volume Mileage vs. Long Run

Best thing to do is take your pulse every day before you get out of bed

that'll tell you wether to take it easy or not that day

Your pulse rate is just a number - which tells you exactly nothing

You should be doing all singles.

You should be doing one run at MP

one run at 15k pace and couple strides.

20 miler for sure

Adding things up here, that's eleven runs Hall is referring to. Each of those runs probably told him something and helped him along the way. But you don't run a good marathon off of eleven training sessions, no matter how great they are. Those runs may very well have been the difference between his 2:08:24 and, I don't know, 2:10:24, let's say. But it isn't those runs that got him most of the way to that 2:10:24 level. It was the day in day out double sessions and training consistency that did that.

Do I think having a run of 2 hours or so makes that schedule better? Absolutely. But if you HAD to sacrafice either the daily consistency or the long run I'd sacrafice the long run.

The trouble with the way many people think about training these days is that they read about those eleven long runs Hall did and think, "That's the secret!" Then they build a plan around the idea of doing long runs and perhaps some pace work and toss the other four or five days of the week aside.

malmo wrote:

wellnow wrote:

You said something about 2x10 miles being less tiring than 1x20

Imagine that.

wellnow wrote:

About 1/2 marathon tempo runs, I do mid week road races as training for my track season, these are 5-7 miles, they are certainly faster than 1/2 marathon pace, and if I am feeling good, sometimes I will run them flat out, so I can't see the problem with 25-40 minutes at HM pace.

The waste bin of unachieved potential is full of runners with your mindset. TEMPO RUNS ARE NOT RACES. They are not interchangeable.

Perhaps if you learned to train properly your 1/2 marathon pace would drop and a glorious epiphany would ring out in your head, "oh, I understand now"?

You really think I am an underachiever malmo? Perhaps you are right. I never thought of myself as a middle distance runner until last year, when I gained a master's world ranking of 7th. OK I'm not really seventh in the world, but the ranking stands, so I must have been doing something right.

I know that TEMPO RUNS ARE NOT RACES. However, I also know that if I want to get anywhere near my potential in next year's London Marathon, I will have to run 20 miles in 1.50 three weeks before the race.

That is a fact, plain and simple. Every time I race a marathon I get the time I deserve compatible with the pace of my tempo runs.

pulse and heart are connected you know

and maybe when your pulse is higher than is normal it's your body telling you to take it easy that day

wellnow wrote:

I know that TEMPO RUNS ARE NOT RACES. However, I also know that if I want to get anywhere near my potential in next year's London Marathon, I will have to run 20 miles in 1.50 three weeks before the race.

That is a fact, plain and simple. Every time I race a marathon I get the time I deserve compatible with the pace of my tempo runs.

Imagine what you could do if you learned how to train? Your tempo runs are way to fast.

I never thought of myself as a middle distance runner until last year, when I gained a master's world ranking of 7th. OK I'm not really seventh in the world, but the ranking stands, so I must have been doing something right.

ohh i can see the stats coming out now

:)

malmo wrote:

wellnow wrote:

I know that TEMPO RUNS ARE NOT RACES. However, I also know that if I want to get anywhere near my potential in next year's London Marathon, I will have to run 20 miles in 1.50 three weeks before the race.

That is a fact, plain and simple. Every time I race a marathon I get the time I deserve compatible with the pace of my tempo runs.

Imagine what you could do if you learned how to train? Your tempo runs are way to fast.

No George, it's the other way around. I aprreciate and respect your advice, but I get the time I deserve. My time this year was 2.37.54. You wont't find it on the website, I had to run without a chip, so my time was not recorded. But I can be seen quite clearly crossing the line in 100th place.

It was a tad warm, but you are right about the humiidity, it was low. I was comfortable at 5.50 miling, for the first half and could have maintained that pace on a cooler cloudier day.

I recovered too quickly after the race. What do you put that down to? I raced as hard as I could.

If I run my tempo's slower I am simply not as fit. Bear in mind that I am not a natural marathon runner.

yeah, 11 long runs in a 12 week period. I replied b/c malmo said the long run was the most overrated aspect in athletics- whatever athletics are. So basically Hall does a long run at least 2 out of three weeks and he highlighted those runs in his pre and prost race interviews so I think they are important even if I can't spell and have no reading comprehension.

Your reading comprehension is still lousy. Let me repost yet another time if see if you understand English?

wellnow wrote:

If I run my tempo's slower I am simply not as fit. Bear in mind that I am not a natural marathon runner.

If I had a nickel for every time I've heard this .... I'd have a shitload of nickels. You're not the first runner to overdo the tempos, and you won't be the last. Learn how to train and your race times will come down. That epiphany is waiting for you.

One last question about tempo runs-

Would use the same frequency/intensity of tempo runs if you were training for a race considerably shorter than a marathon? Say you're training for an 8k or a 5k, do you keep that effort level the same as with tempo runs you would do preparing for a marathon?

The pace would be slightly faster, and you would express it differently. Since you're a 5k and 8k runner, you would run at a pace that is 10-15 secs/mile slower than your current 10k race pace (or equal to your current 10-mile race pace, which you might not know if you just race shorter distances). This is obviously a tad faster than the current half-marathon race pace that has been mentioned for marathoners on this thread.

After you do a proper warm up, the duration of your tempo run should be from 20-30 minutes. Daniels has recently said that the same training effect can be achieved for up to 45 mins. But I don't see how you can run at the suggested pace for that length of time.

As for effort, you should feel confident at the halfway point that you can hold the pace constant, and you shouldn't be tying up at all, except perhaps right at the end.

Living in the Past wrote:

and you shouldn't be tying up at all, except perhaps right at the end.

Tying up at the end of a tempo run? Isn't that called racing?

Let me clarify. You shouldn't be feeling the kind of fatigue that one associates with anaerobic running until the very end of the tempo run, if at all. The point is that you want to stay just below threshold. If at the end you are JUST starting to feel a slight burn in the legs and lungs, then you've stayed at or below threshold.

Living in the Past wrote:

After you do a proper warm up, the duration of your tempo run should be from 20-30 minutes. Daniels has recently said that the same training effect can be achieved for up to 45 mins. But I don't see how you can run at the suggested pace for that length of time.

Perhaps due to the terse communications typical of forums such as this one, Daniels gets taken out of context a lot.

There are two editions of Daniels Running Formula. In the first edition a tempo run was defined as being "ideally" 20 minutes fast continuous run at 1 hour race pace. There were other variants in the form of cruise intervals, but the pace was rigidly defined and nowhere does he suggest more than 25 minutes (I believe, certainly not 45 minutes) continuous in a workout.

In the second edition of DRF he allows a more broad prescription for tempo runs with the range from 20 minutes to 60 minutes. He has a table of pace goals for different workout durations, the shortest being 20 minutes @ 1 hour race pace as before and the longest being 1 hour @ marathon pace.

the long run should be your base 20% of weekly milage,

malmo wrote:

The long run is the most over-rated aspect of athletic training. You could completely do without it if you wanted.

Do everything else right first, only then should you bother with the long run.

"The long run is the most over-rated aspect of athletic training. You could completely do without it if you wanted"

This is still wrong - that you completly do without.

Its better for you to correct my reading comphrension than to address the issue and call it athletic training. If I was training at 300 pound lineman I wouldn't have run 20 miles either. In America we call it running and marathon training. Athletics is all sports or the baseball team that plays in Oakland.

Anywhere you go the long run is a key part. It might be overrated, but you can't do with out it.