Miracle 2:30 Marathon Training Plan

Lol sorry this is how i was planning on doing my updates. The terrain is just too unrelaible compared to whwre i am going to do my time trial 2 months from now and even CIM. Not even I am caring much about my splits. Once i get to flat even terrain i'll include splits which are more likely to be even mile to mile plus track workout interval splits. It's a long way to december many more posts to make. Hopefully i can include splits next month if i leave this runner's hell hole, fingers crossed.

Impala31 wrote:

don't train at 1h10 HM pace now since you are far from 1h10 shape at the moment.

train at 1h20 pace and increase slowly pace over the weeks towards 1h10. Otherwise you will be overtraining and likely get injured or necessity to take many days off instead of workouts like you' ve already started to do (sorry for my English)

Thanks :) ya i'm kinda gonna be forced to go by feel for the next 4 months and assess when i change my location in july and do my first tempo. Given the summer heat, as long as i go sub 1:15 in my time trial i'd be confident to resume training for the 2:30 marathon in december.

*next 4 weeks

What are the elevation gains for your average easy runs? I tend to think hilly terrain is a blessing for a runner.

GPS says 480 feet. But i don't know how reliable that is. Apart from that sharp hill i mentioned a third of the way into my easy runs, what pisses me off isn't the elevation gain. Gradual elevation is no big deal. What i'm dealing with is the kind of hills that are like oversized high speed bumps about 6-10ish feet high over 15 meters of running. On paper its fine but i keep going from uphill to downhill on very short stretches of road before i encounter the next one. I run along the ocean. You know how it gets a little high a little low on the coast. That's what i'm dealing with and is also why i can't find any flat location. It's really maddening. If anything i hope i get some long term improvements for my suffering even though i'm not getting good numbers from my workouts

highhoppingworm wrote:

I don't mean to be rude but I believe that the updates that people are hoping for are your actual training weeks... e.g.

M - 10 miles at 7:15 pace

T - 3 mile w/u, 5 mile tempo run at avg. 5:25 pace, 2 mile c/d

etc...

+1

let's see the details!

this thread is maddening to read

so many excuses...just setting up for failure. seems like OP made up his mind before posting anything and isn't willing to change anything.

you're not the only person with hills on your runs. you're not the only person dealing with heat. it's fine that it all slows you down by a few seconds per mile...or even ten seconds per mile.

if your 10mi run had over 1600ft of climbing, then maybe it wouldn't be a great training spot. the best marathon shape I ever got into was when I was training for hilly trail races and was doing well over 5000' of climbing per week and sometimes 10,000ft in maybe 80 miles.

Maybe it's because i'm relatively new to the sport. It's also misfortunate that every new stimulus that i get happens to be in the absence of previous training stimuli so i don't know what i did right or what i did wrong or what could be happening. I don't doubt there will come a time where i'll look back at this and other threads i've started and laugh. But i guess that's wisdom that comes with experience i guess which is something i don't have. A lot of people here are high schoolers just starting running or college runners who ran in high school or people in their 40s and above with decades of experience. I hope that i can look at this sport the way all of you do, years from now at least. By which point i hope that everything i could experience in training i would have. Right now i'm dreading the unknown. I worked really hard on the plan i made and i hope that it pays dividends in the future.

Sorry if this thread is driving some of you crazy. I promised you guys i'll update you along the way, and hopefully i'll have some representative numbers for you guys on my next update in july.

Wow this is going to be a long update:

Over the last 5 weeks i built some fitness and instead of fighting the elevation i started running on a constantly uphill route on tuesdays every week 4 miles up and 4 miles back down. Wednesdays I continued to do pyramid intervals and I continued not to record the time because i went off my GPS watch which i established was inaccurate. Despite changes in intensity, interval times would only vary by a second. I still put in a lot of effort. Watch said I was running at 5:40 mile pace every week since March for all intervals from 400-1600 if you really wanted the numbers as you guys previously asked. 2.2 mile warmup and 2.2 mile cooldown. Basically thats the distance from where i live to the flattest section i had access to.

Thursdays are a regular run. They have slowed down as the months progressed from 7:40 mile pace to 8:10 mile pace running 8 miles on that day.

Fridays were tempo. 15 minute warmup, post tempo, 2x200 as fast as i can followed by 15 minute cooldown.

These were my times, given the temperature conditions and my lack of adequate access to water and having to dodge more cars as quarantine measures got lifted, I didn't go all out on pace. Ideallg I would have gone for 5:45 pace at least but i didn't want to risk heat stroke. In terms of ability though I know i could have run faster but better safe than sorry, as I felt more confident I cut down the pace the following weeks:

June 12: 3 miles 6:29 pace

June 19: 4 miles 6:17 pace

June 26: 2 miles 6:00 pace

July 3, skipped too humid and hot

July 10: 3 miles 6:17 pace

Saturdays: were 6-8 miles depending on how i felt, pace was 7:40-8:15, easy intensity

Sunday Long run:

LSD pace 7:50-8:30

CV pace: 6:30-6:40

Long runs since last update

12 Miles LSD

16 Miles LSD

12 miles with 3 miles at CV

16 miles LSD

12 Miles with 4 miles at CV

Mondays are off

Average weekly mileage 50-56

As you can see, the weeks where I had some intense miles in the long run, mileage was lower but I had 3 fast running days and they beat me up more.

Fast forward to today. I just left France and am now in Dubai. I'm facing 100 degree lows and 120 degree highs. 77-82 degree dew points. I arrived yesterday and haven't run since Tuesday, i'll be able to resume my routine by Saturday hopefully I won't lose a lot of fitness in these few days. Maybe the fact that last week was one of those 3 fast run weeks.

I'm worried about finishing the 18 mile long run on sunday alive in these conditions let alone, a sub 75 minute HM on August 9. My easy runs will be on an assault runner in a gym that i signed up for. Interval days will be on a track that I have access to finally! I will swim 3 times a week, cycle before my runs and resume strength training on tuesdays and thursdays which was my routine before the pandemic. I don't know how to adjust my time goal given the temperature change or if I should push back the time trial. The goal was do the TT on the 9th take a week off after then start a 16 week buildup for CIM on December 6. If I push back the time trial i'll have a shorter buildup obviously. Then again, since my last update cases have spiked again and i don't know if CIM will happen but I will continue to train until it is cancelled.

My buildup for the HM TT so far has made me feel stronger. I feel less achy than before. I've adjusted to running on the roads, I need less time to warmup and i'm not as tight as I used to be. My mileage hasn't changed but my long run pace has been more consistent even when its slow rather than gradually getting slower as the run progresses. When I run downhill I feel stronger and more in control than I ever was.

Questions for you guys:

What do you guys think of my training so far?

Should I push back the TT or adjust my time goal or both?

I hope to update you guys again in 2 weeks since this is a new environment and there might be a lot of information to give as my body responds to these new conditions and i'll give you my interval times on a track since I have access to one finally.

So you were in the south of France. Now you’re in Dubai. Are you 007 or something?

The truth? I don't think you have a snowballs chance in hell at 1:15. Sub 1:23 would be a good performance IMHO. Nothing in your training or progress suggests anything that merits the title of this thread. To put it in perspective, a workout indicative of a 1:15 HM would be you 4x your June 26 tempo with 2:30 rest and 15-20 seconds per mile faster per mile.

You need to re-calibrate your expectations and approach.

Been following this thread. In your opinion what is the estimated marathon time of someone who could run 10mi at 6min per mi pace in a tempo run?

Thx!

I am the wrong person to ask and also don't think it is enough info. There are lots of high schoolers that could do that but couldn't crack 3 hours and some older dudes that couldn't do that but could run 6:30s for a full.

If you held a gun to my head I guess I would probably go to the VDOT tables and look at what VDOT corresponds to T pace @ 6:00, recognize it equals a 57/58 and then look at the corresponding race prediction which is probably 2:48-2:49 for a full and 1:20-1:21 for a HM. Both of those seem like pretty aggressive times to me IMHO so maybe 2:52 and 1:22?

I see - and you're right too many variables. I have a buddy that can't hold that pace in a workout but his marathon PR is faster than 2:48.

More just thinking about the first page where someone asked OP if he could run 10mi at 6, and thinking that could've been a reasonable indicator on his path to 2:30.

I definitely think i can hold sub 6 pace for 10 miles. I was playing it very safe. When i did those tempos i was in a hilly area if you read the whole thread as i revealed more information when I was stuck in france since March. It was very hot and humid i even cancelled one tempo this last month because of it. Under ideal conditions i believe I could have held at least 5:40 pace for 10 miles. highhoppingworm it seems you have forgotten that my HM PR was 1:21 in December and I have gotten fitter during the pandemic. Unless you mean 1:23 if I were to race in Dubai with the high heat and humidity on the original TT date then ya i could be lucky to break 1:20. So what do you think should I push it back? I don't think we'll know about CIM until well after August 9

In the post above you mention that your CV pace is 6:30 to 6:40. Did you mean 5:30-5:40? Your CV will even be slightly faster than that if you can run 10 miles at 5:40 pace.

10 miles at 5:40 pace is probably worth 1:15 to 1:16 in a half marathon. There's nothing in your training that points to being able to complete this. Unless there is more to this than you are telling everyone on here? If so, I would suggest printing out your schedule of what you've done each week in very simple terms. Example -

Monday - 5 miles, 8 minute pace

Tuesday - 8 mile run w/ 4 mile tempo at 5:50 pace

Wednesday - 7 mile recovery run

Etc.

Crapgame wrote:

In the post above you mention that your CV pace is 6:30 to 6:40. Did you mean 5:30-5:40? Your CV will even be slightly faster than that if you can run 10 miles at 5:40 pace.

CV may have been the wrong term. I would say there was some effort but at the pace i was running i could hold it for 2 hours easily is what i'm calling CV. But I think it's wrong.

To the other poster I do have a copy of my plan but the paces were modified and tailored to effort because of the heat that i forgot to take into account when i wrote up the plan in Mid May. I don't think I can upload a document here and I don't want to type out every single day. What i posted yesterday pretty much is exactly what the plan looks like week to week

By schedule , I mean posting last's week's workouts. Not planned workouts for the future - actual results of week to week training.