Jack Daniels 2Q'ing Again - Long Run Advice

paul g wrote:

Hello all,

I'm about to start training for the Green Bay marathon in May. I'm hoping to break 3 hours (3:06 PR in 2014) and I decided to do the JD 2q 18 week plan, but I have to say I'm having a hard time figuring out what to run on my non-Q days. I have the book, read it but it's still a little unclear how I should be approaching the tempo/interval runs. I did Furman before and that was spelled out pretty clearly but I'm having a hard time finding clarity with JD on non-Q days. Any advice or help is much appreciated.

- you can literally follow the 2Q plan: besides the two Q days, spread the residual mileage over the remaining days as you please. in my case, that typically meant three easy days with about an hour of easy running plus two rest days.

- 40mpw max might be a bit too low to run the 5k-equivalent marathon time, but it worked for me with 50-55mpw average and a max of 65. there are typically two opposing effects: on the one hand, we are not running enough miles, hence 5k time is typically better than the equivalent marathon time. on the other hand, at the end of the marathon training cycle you should be in better shape than right before you started it, which is when you should have run the 5k. this is especially true if it's your first serious training cycle.

- I was also worried about the long runs not being long enough, so I ended up adding a few miles to some of the long runs. the steady long runs are the ones I would modify. whether that made a difference or not, I can't say for sure, probably not.

good luck

I never used the 2Q plan, but I follow marathon training plan A from the 2nd edition of his book. My guess is that it works pretty similarly.

In that plan, the "step back" weeks aren't really step back weeks despite the lower mileage of those weeks. He structures the plan so that on the low volume weeks, you have relatively high intensity training days (two quality days, one of them usually being one of the tougher workouts of the cycle). The higher volume weeks are less intense, with one workout day and then the other quality day being the long run at easy distance pace.

The end result is that you end up with weeks that are pretty consistent in overall effort throughout the cycle, but you have an inverse relationship between the two factors that go into that overall effort.

above_average_joe wrote:

paul g wrote:

Hello all,

I'm about to start training for the Green Bay marathon in May. I'm hoping to break 3 hours (3:06 PR in 2014) and I decided to do the JD 2q 18 week plan, but I have to say I'm having a hard time figuring out what to run on my non-Q days. I have the book, read it but it's still a little unclear how I should be approaching the tempo/interval runs. I did Furman before and that was spelled out pretty clearly but I'm having a hard time finding clarity with JD on non-Q days. Any advice or help is much appreciated.

- you can literally follow the 2Q plan:

If that doesn´t work out, can he follow it figuratively?

Learnwhatwordsmean wrote:

above_average_joe wrote:

- you can literally follow the 2Q plan:

If that doesn´t work out, can he follow it figuratively?

He could follow the plan both literally and figuratively.

JD beat me up today - 4E+8M+1T+6M+1T+1E, 86f ‘humidex’ no less by the time I was done.

Probably the hardest long run I think in the 2Q 3rd edition. I did take 3-4 one minute hydration breaks, hams were cramping slightly in the final 1E but I was flying through the final 1T. I couldn’t have completed the run without the hydration breaks, and my pace did slip about 0:20 a mile as the morning approached the mid-day heat.

Hopefully bodes we’ll for the fall, pace was slower than I planned but the heat was hotter than expected.

Just bumping an interesting thread as I try to decide how to prepare for my next race. It's a good read almost all the way through.

Coach Jeff ROC wrote:

Just bumping an interesting thread as I try to decide how to prepare for my next race. It's a good read almost all the way through.

+1