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Smoove wrote:

I still haven't decided whether I am going to race Boston this year, but am leaning toward racing (maybe 70/30). If I do race, and get good weather, I might shoot for sub 2:30, although that is a tough course to run fast on unless you get a tailwind.

I haven't started to focus on Boston yet because I am racing a half marathon in January, so that would be my springboard into marathon training.

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Smoove wrote:
I am not good enough to have to worry about racing for position, so I didn't worry about having to do vo2max pace or anything particularly fast since I knew I wouldn't be throwing in or responding to surges. Instead, it was all about improving my lactate threshold.

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georgiarunner17 wrote:

There is nothing special about VO2 max PACE or its impact on VO2 max... Different paces are just different stressors on your system that help your body to adapt. VO2 max is simply the maximum amount of oxygen that your body can consume when you are running your hardest. All training paces help to increase VO2 max, which is really a fuction of capillary density, mitochondrial density, cardiac output, and muscle fiber type. VO2 max PACE is a rather arbitrarily defined pace, around 3k to 5k pace. During a 3k or 5k, your VO2 is likely equaling your VO2 max, ie you are consuming as much oxygen as you possibly can, although this happens at a wide range of race distances.

Running faster, harder intervals is an efficient way to increase VO2, assuming the athlete has a sufficient running background and reasonable mileage. However, there are a limited number of successful hard workouts an athlete can do in a training cycle before there is a risk of burnout.

VO2 is just a metric, not a pace, and having a higher VO2 does not mean that you can only run faster at VO2 max pace. A higher VO2 means that one or more of your other physiological metrics is higher, which means that your are more efficient at ALL paces (assuming your running economy doesn't decrease). Ultimately, VO2 max impacts the lactate threshold, which is the singular metric that determines physiological running capacity.

Defining lactate threshold is important here. I'll consider it to be the pace at which an athlete begins to exceed their lactate inflection point over a given time interval (i.e., how fast do you have to run for 10 min for lactate to build up in your system).

There are a few other important factors to consider when it comes to the marathon, however: running economy at different paces and fueling. These two factors are why long runs and long tempos are vital to the marathon. Depleting your glycogen stores during a long run or tempo will teach your body to store more glycogen and burn more fat during a marathon. Running farther at fast paces will teach your body to run more efficiently at those paces by slimming you down and optimizing your form. By optimizing your form, I mean that your body will redistribute muscle mass so that less important muscles are comparatively smaller and more important muscles are larger, to optimize force transduction to the ground without having excessive muscle mass.

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