Getting technical

Well – by my standards, i.e. Not Very :-) However I had bought the Pfitzinger & Douglas (henceforth to be known as P&D) Advanced Marathoning book, which is a bit of a joke really as I am far from an Advanced Marathoner, but since everyone on the Edinburgh Marathon (Fetch) thread was raving about it and I am never one to eschew a bandwagon, off I trotted to Amazon. It duly arrived and turned out to be a very good read, even if some of the higher-mileage training schedules are downright scary. I don’t think I’ll be running 100 mile weeks any time soon, but the up-to-55 miles-a-week schedule looks distinctly more achievable when I do decide to bite the bullet and enter another marathon.

Since I'm not planning another marathon this year, the book purchase could be seen as being a bit redundant really, but what it did do was get me thinking about the pace I'm doing my runs and the reason I'm doing them and that if I want to improve, which I DO (two half marathons and a 10k coming up and I really want to knock spots off my previous PBs) maybe I should be a bit stricter with myself about what I'm doing and how fast, rather than just going out and doing whatever I damn well feel like.

So what I have done is to put my recent 5k time of 25:02 (my most recent, and so far best in WAVA terms, race time) into the McMillan Running Calculator, and this is what it came up with -

Endurance Workouts Pace/Mile

Recovery Jogs 10:49 to 11:19
Long Runs 9:49 to 10:49
Easy Runs 9:49 to 10:19

Stamina Workouts Pace/Mile

Steady-State Runs 8:50 to 9:06
Tempo Runs 8:28 to 8:50
Tempo Intervals 8:21 to 8:39

Speed Workouts

Middle Distance Runners Long Distance Runners
400m 1:47.8 to 1:52.4 1:49.9 to 1:56.3
800m 3:39.9 to 3:50.0 3:49.7 to 4:00.3
1000m 4:47.1 to 5:00.4 4:54.2 to 5:05.5
1200m 5:44.9 to 6:00.5 5:53.0 to 6:10.9
1600m 7:50.7 to 8:08.8 8:00.7 to 8:18.4
2000m 10:00.9 to 10:18.2 10:11.0 to 10:23.0
(sorry about spacing, I can't seem to figure out how to do it in blog)

which once I had recovered from my head exploding, looked about right to me. Assuming that my HM pace is 9m/m (I haven't actually run this pace in a HM but it's my goal pace for a sub-2 and should be achievable), that means doing long runs at what works out as very close to that pace plus 10-20% which - hurrah! - is what P&D say you should be doing. Admittedly with marathon pace rather than half, but I figured it would still work.

So yesterday I headed off for a 9 mile run (my longest since Embra a fortnight ago) with the intention of sticking to the suggested range, i.e. 9:49-10:49, and aiming to do what P&D suggest and make the last few miles closer to 10% than 20%. And it worked :-)

Splits:
10:28 10:03 10:02 9:50 9:51 9:58 9:56 9:56 9:41

Fairly flat route except the first half mile is uphill and the last 3 miles a very gradual uphill, a few other inclines along the way but nothing drastic.

This felt like a comfortable pace and I wasn't too knackered by the end. OK, it's *only* 9 miles so hardly qualifies as a P&D style long run, but gets my HM training off the mark.

Planning some 1000m intervals on Tuesday at 8m/m pace, ahead of the Beach 10k on the 14th June.

:)