Marathon longest training run - over distance?

You need to teach your body to burn a more favorable ratio of fat to glycogen. HOW you run your marathon specific workouts is more important than just the number of miles.

You should seriously contact someone like Nate Jenkins and get some advice. If you really want to improve, take a few minutes and seek him out. I have his e-mail address but if you are serious you will take the initiative and find it yourself.

Of all the people Nate Jenkins has some secret?

I understood that the idea of doing a long run was to teach your body to cope with running for the duration of your target time.

So, if I'm aiming for 2hr30 then a 24.5mile trail run took me just a little bit longer than this amount of time.

I'm a bit confused since I know that some elite runners (Bekele, Neuruker) advocate running over-distance meaning they would be on their feet much longer in training than they would be during the race.

Why don't you concentrate on getting better at your marathon pace? I think 24+ miles off 85 MPW (over 25 percent of your mileage) shows that you might not have enough emphasis on developing your speed and getting your marathon pace to be more efficient.

If you were doing 110-120, 24+ mile long runs would start to make sense. That's a difference of almost five miles a day - really another level. I'd just even out your 85 miles during the week and throw in more quality stuff. Are you avoiding doing an extra tempo or workout in order to get such a long run in? Think about it ...

I've done those long runs off the same mileage just because I was afraid I couldn't do the marathon distance. You've already done one, so just be confident in your training and develop your marathon pace.

My two cents.

Three things:

1 - If you're doing a 24.5 mile run close to 2:30, with a goal marathon pace of 2:30, then your marathon pace is severely out of whack. That kind of workout would be indicative of a much, much better marathon. Check your GPS or get a new goal pace! If that is accurate, then you're running way too hard and setting yourself back, especially off 85 miles per week, unless you're shooting for low 2:20's. That kind of workout for a 2:30 runner would be cringe-worthy for your coach.

2 - For someone running 2:30, there should be no problem staying "on your feet". There are much more specific goals for someone doing quality long runs - the most important one probably being aerobic development with a mix of building efficiency (mechanical and physiological) at marathon pace.

3 - Don't train like Bekele! Or at least, run a few 27 mins or 2:05 first.

Just trying to help. I would love to run 2:30 so I'm not being holier than thou!

One doesn't need to run marathon pace in long runs. Too debilitating. What is helpful are some hard 5, 10 and even 20K efforts during the last month or six weeks. Also, throwing in surges and doing progressions during regular efforts is helpful, esp for neuromuscular purposes. When I did this stuff semi-seriously, many years ago, I found a combo of hard racing at 5,10,20 plus a 24 or so helpful for body confidence--the central governor! I personally find 20 miles of pre-marathon tempos or harder to be a recipe for disaster. Study Billy Rodgers' build ups.

At your level, or any level for that matter, thinking that a single longer LR is going to be the difference is foolish. The more important question is how is your current mileage different from previous buildups? Without a pretty significant change in either intensity and more importantly weekly mileage, just making minor tweaks isn't going to get you from 2:33 to under 2:30.

My training week looks like this:

MON: am 6 easy / pm 8 easy

TUE: am 6 easy / pm track session - 3k-5k pace intervals

WED: am 6 easy / pm 8 easy

THU: pm tempo (05:30 - 05:45 pace)

FRI: am 6 easy / pm 8 easy

SAT: rest or XC race or hills

SUN: long run

I've built my tempo sessions up from 6miles to 10.5miles (last night at 05:45 pace).

My long run last sunday was 23miles, usually at around 06:40-07:00 pace depending on the route and weather conditions.

Sub 2:20 Japanese females have done overdistance, or 35 to 50 miles in a day.

Doing the high mileage day with no carbs between workouts

is one way of reinforcing fat burning.

Check out Canova's Special Block.

Running M pace with no coffee or breakfast for fat burning.

fred wrote:

Doing the high mileage day with no carbs between workouts

is one way of reinforcing fat burning.

This is non-sense from a scientific standpoint, but if mentally it helps, go for it. More likely it'll lead to a crappy second run therefor reducing the training benefit.

It's not 1970 anymore.

sub02:30:00orbust wrote:

My long run last sunday was 23miles, usually at around 06:40-07:00 pace depending on the route and weather conditions.

I ran with a guy who always ran 20 at 6:20 to 6:30, a guy

who ran 20 @ 6 and a guy who would finish 20 with some 5:45's. The last 2 were 2:32 guys because the pace was more

specific.

6:40 to 7 is too slow unless you are running 30 miles for

a workout.

minong wrote:

fred wrote:

Doing the high mileage day with no carbs between workouts

is one way of reinforcing fat burning.

This is non-sense from a scientific standpoint, but if mentally it helps, go for it. More likely it'll lead to a crappy second run therefor reducing the training benefit.

It's not 1970 anymore.

Nope, 2003.

"Renato Canova RE: TRAINING 9/25/2003 6:14AM - in reply to Abuc

Marathon is 42 km long also for women, so, if is possible, the volume in training for a woman is the same of a man. It's wrong to consider the quantity of training in relation of the used time.

If we prepare 1 hour race, may be correct to speak about the total time of training, because the event lasts the same time, and the difference is in distance ; on the contrary, if we are speaking about a distance, we have to put in relation the volume in km run during the preparation, as for men like for women.

For ex., I often use a type of training called "SPECIFIC or SPECIAL BLOCK", consisting in one tough training in the morning and in the afternoon, in order to put in crisis your body for exhalting the SUPERCOMPENSATION. If the managment of this training is correct (is very important to recovery well after, and to be fresh before), normally the athletes have a good improvement in their shape, in short time.

An example of this type of training (that can have different typologies, and different targets), made with ORNELLA FERRARA (bronze medal in '95 WCH), is the following (16th of July 1995) :

Morning : 15 min easy run + 24 km at 3'36"6 average per km

Afternoon : 15 min easy run + 24 km at 3'34"2 p/km

In that day, Ornella ran about 54 km, among them 48 about 95-98% of Marathon Pace.

So, there is no difference between training of men and women. An athlete is an athlete, also if there are physiological and psychological differences. Of sure, Paula Radcliffe and Naoko Takahashi run as much as the best male runners.

Read more:

Dude, your "marathon" training is bush league. Get a coach or something - it looks like you're training for cross country and then you want to throw in an ill advised and scientifically dubious "over distance" run to make up for it. All the fast running with 6/8 doubles and 85 MPW will not get you to your best marathon. Which, having run 2:33 in your first one, should be low 2:20's. Drop the college XC training and give yourself a few years to get there - it should be easy.

Fred, that says nothing about your "no carbs" crap that you threw out which is BS from back in the day. And just because Canova advocates a single hard LR in a training cycle doesn't mean to do it every week. You said the OP is wasting his time running 6:40-7:00 on his LR's which is totally not the case.

If your buddy could routinely run 20 in 6's but could only manage 2:32, he ran his best races in training.

minong wrote:

Fred, that says nothing about your "no carbs" crap that you threw out which is BS from back in the day. And just because Canova advocates a single hard LR in a training cycle doesn't mean to do it every week. You said the OP is wasting his time running 6:40-7:00 on his LR's which is totally not the case.

If your buddy could routinely run 20 in 6's but could only manage 2:32, he ran his best races in training.

Nope. It's on this board somewhere where Canova says they

run that second hard workout in a non-replenished carb

state.

"An interesting key session he has is 20k in the am with last 10k pretty hard (marathon pace?) and the same in the afternoon. In between sessions he doesn't advocate eating too much to stimulate running hard on low glycogen."

How many Americans broke 2:11 in 2013?

I guess your latest training model is really working out for

you.

SMJO wrote:

Of all the people Nate Jenkins has some secret?

Yes. His semen can form into a liquid human, like that guy from Terminator 2.

One time he showed me a video of him making love to my wife. It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw.

My marathon pace for

24.5 miles without water? Bad idea, and I'm surprised nobody mentioned this yet. You are unnecessarily harming yourself with this kind of dehydration and setting your training back, and to the detriment of your performance on race day.