HRE wrote:
Guys like Ron Hill and Jack Foster would often run 6-7 marathons a year along with many more short races and had long careers. Maybe 2-3 of the marathons were full throttle efforts and the others were lower key. It looks like Kawauchi is doing something along those lines.
Maybe this is a good example of Yuki's racing schedule working for someone, however Hill's PR is 2:09 and Foster's is 2:11. Both great but quite a difference from what it takes to run with the Kenyans these days.
Several posters here are arguing that running several minutes off of his PR must not be very hard efforts. But notice that the slowest marathon of the 4 I posted was at the World Champs. Do you really think he didn't go all out there? I am guessing he hammered as hard as possible. Heat/humidity and other factors play in to that, but my point is that a 2:08/2:09 guy running 2:14/2:16 is usually still a very hard effort.