Good/Bad/or Normal - Improving 6 minutes (for marathon) in the past 18 months

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4 years ago 10/19/2019 10:52am EDT

Question:

A) Where on the bell curve am I - my marathon time only improved by 6 minutes in the past 18 months

B) Should I increase mileage, or doing something different like strength training?

Background:

- Been running for 3 years

- Progression: 3:30 (2017) 3:01 (early 2018) 2:55 (2019)

- Every training cycle was the same stuff. 60 mpw (on Jack Daniels-inspired plan)

I'm mainly concerned that in the past ONE YEAR and a HALF, I only managed to shave 6 minutes with almost year-round 60 MPW schedule.

I'm starting to wonder if I'm doing something ineffectively. I hear stories of dudes going from 3:30 to 2:45 in just one year.

4 years ago 10/19/2019 10:57am EDT

re: dollups

Improvement is like folding a piece of paper in half. Each time you fold it, it gets harder to make a clean fold. I’d say your experience is normal. Everyone does have a limit. So I guess where you go from here is you can experiment by increasing mileage and/or overall intensity, ala Renato Canova.

4 years ago 10/19/2019 2:13pm EDT

re: dollups

The average marathon finishing time, on a good day, is somewhere around 4 hours, so you're far enough into the right tail of the bell curve that a bell curve model might not be helpful. As far as improvement goes, your case sounds pretty normal. Running even 10s/mile faster than marathon pace for 26.2 miles sounds crazy after the fact, but it only gets you a bit over 4 minutes of improvement.

A bigger issue might just be that repeating the same kind of training is having diminishing returns. You've done 3 years of Daniels marathon training at 60 mpw, and at this point you might plateau unless you give yourself a new stimulus or two. Like:

Why 60 mpw year round? You might reap bigger gains from maintaining 70-80 mpw for just the peak 6-10 weeks of a marathon buildup.

Why Daniels? Nothing wrong with his plan and it works for a lot of people, but what if you tried a different approach?

Why the marathon? To run a better marathon in a year or two, maybe you need a solid block of mile/5K training to work on aspects of fitness you've neglected. Or a block of 10K/HM training.

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Good/Bad/or Normal - Improving 6 minutes (for marathon) in the past 18 months

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