long story short. I’ve got a kid who had a pretty bad cc season. It turns out that he had been taking acutane throughout the season. His workouts and races kept getting slower. Whereas he should have competed for a league title during cross, he ended up as the #2 runner on our team, well over a minute behind the league champ. He’s done with the meds now and about 2 months ago, as we were getting back into our build up for track, he asked if he could run a marathon, as a way to motivate himself to train during the winter. I told him I thought it would be fine and helped him set up a schedule.
When we first talked, he said his goal was to just finish, so I made a schedule designed to make him comfortable with the distance. However, about 3 weeks ago, I looked up the results of last year’s race and saw that it was won in 3:06. I told him that if it was the same winning time this year that he could probably win. He kind of liked that idea. I’m just afraid he’s going to run himself into the ground today. Running to win is way different than just running to finish.
This is what his training schedule has looked like.
70 ish MPW
1 LR, adding 1 mile per week. He started at 12 and topped out 2 weeks ago at 19 at 7:40 pace quite comfortably.
The other two sessions were geared more toward the upcoming track season. One was a threshold session, usually consisting of something like 2x2 miles at about 12 minutes with short rest and the other was something like 8x200 at 1600 pace (35) with a slow 200m recovery jog.
Last week, he dropped his LR to 15 miles but ran the last 5 at target pace (7:00). he said it felt easy. This week, his Monday workout of 200s was the same as it has been, but the Wednesday threshold session was dropped to 3x1 mile with a minute rest. All 3 were in the mid 6:50 range.
1 does he have a chance to hold goal pace for 26 miles?
2 How wrecked is he going to be?
the race is today. I’m thinking he’ll take a couple of days off then go really easy for the rest of next week at the least.