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Marathon Newsletter Week 10
Dear Marathon Runner,
Week 10, and I'm a bit late out of the blocks, as it's already Wednesday of Week 11 - but I do have an excuse - you could fry an egg on my usual laptop - it's caught some kind of internet disease. I imagine that your feet must feel the same at the moment - but stick with it, the rewards are coming - not just on marathon day, but in the weeks and months that follow.
We're up to 695 Fetchies listed for VLM now, and 488 of you ran last week (down a little bit), with a median mileage of 33.11 (up a whopping 2.7 miles!), and a median long run of 15.99 (up 2 miles on last week - I said it'd go nuts!). Here are those numbers broken down into our pace groups:
| Week 5 summary | 3:00 | 3:15 | 3:30 | 3:45 | 4:00 | 4:15 | 4:30 | 4:45 | 5:00 |
| Race Pace | 6:52 | 7:27 | 8:01 | 8:35 | 9:10 | 9:44 | 10:18 | 10:53 | 11:27 |
| Total Mileage | 54.7 | 45.4 | 32.9 | 33.2 | 32.2 | 27.8 | 28.1 | 22.8 | 22.9 |
| Average Pace (mins/mile) | 7:19 | 7:55 | 8:22 | 8:27 | 8:51 | 9:28 | 10:01 | 9:47 | 10:42 |
| Longest Run | 19.1 | 20.0 | 14.0 | 16.0 | 16.2 | 14.7 | 16.1 | 10.0 | 13.6 |
| Longest Run Pace (mins/mile) | 7:10 | 7:57 | 8:22 | 8:26 | 8:58 | 9:43 | 10:02 | 9:47 | 10:46 |
Well done to the 3:15 group for recording the first 20 average for longest run, and upping their weekly total after an easier week last time out. The 3:45's ran their long runs faster than race pace - be careful folks. There's a real huge mileage increase across the board, and it's the turn of the 4:45's to go ballistic with the pace, running their longest run more than a minute quicker than their race pace. How did you feel at the end?
My random mid-newsletter tip for this week is to practice mind games. In any tough run, there are always moments when you feel like giving up and getting the bus home. Your legs have the easy job in some ways, they just keep doing the same thing over and over. There's a fair bit of talk on the forum about running style, and getting your arms and legs in the right place - but your mind moves in ways that your legs never will. You could try a bit of disassociation, and play Numberwang with the other competitors bib numbers (cheers Mulbs!), or write a list of 26 people and think about them during each mile, or promise yourself treats for various milestones. What you do is down to you, but my tip is to be ready for it.
On to a bit of statsturbation, and I thought I'd look at a couple of the differences between men and women when it comes to marathon training. My data set currently contains 2588 marathon performances - 73% of these were by males. Compare this to the overall population of FE, which is 63% male, and the first conclusion is that men are a bit more likely to do marathons than women. This next table shows the percentage of men/women achieving each time e.g. 10.65% of women made it into the 3:45 bracket, and also the percentage of average mileage that each sex puts in e.g. a 3:45 male runner turns in 2.4% less than the average across both sexes, a female runs 9.5% more.
| Percentage of Performances | 3:00 | 3:15 | 3:30 | 3:45 | 4:00 | 4:15 | 4:30 | 4:45 | 5:00 |
| Males | 7.48 | 11.15 | 14.17 | 15.87 | 16.83 | 13 | 10.3 | 7.22 | 3.98 |
| Females | 1.14 | 3.69 | 6.96 | 10.65 | 15.48 | 15.77 | 17.33 | 14.35 | 14.63 |
| Percentage of Average Mileage | 3:00 | 3:15 | 3:30 | 3:45 | 4:00 | 4:15 | 4:30 | 4:45 | 5:00 |
| Males | 94.6 | 96.9 | 96.3 | 97.6 | 99.2 | 99.5 | 98.2 | 100.1 | 96.3 |
| Females | 195 | 125.4 | 120.2 | 109.5 | 102.3 | 101.0 | 102.8 | 99.9 | 102.7 |
Interestingly, there's a definite peak for men within the 3:00 to 5:00 range, but the womens numbers continue fairly consistently down the time scale - could it be that the blokes (not all of them by any means) won't do something if they feel they're not especially fast, whereas ladies (not all of them by any means) are more interested in being part of the event? The mileage percentages look very scary at the faster end of the female scale, but there were only 8 ladies in that group, so it wouldn't take much to push the average right up. Overall though it seems that ladies have to turn in an increasingly higher proportion of mileage than their male counterparts. There is good news though - if a man and woman have the same half marathon time, the woman will be faster over the full marathon (a 1:40 female half typically produces a 3:48:50 marathon, beating a typical man by nearly 7 minutes). I realise I'm on very dodgy territory here, as any movement from the fence is going to result in a group thrashing, so I'll stop there. I'm actually very glad to be part of a sport that welcomes Everyone. Hence the name. Maybe.
That's all for this week - I feel like I could have done better, but right now I need to put my laptop on its side, tip Domestos into it, shake it all up and start again. I would really like to make these newsletters into something broader, because there's a load of data in the Fetch database just waiting to be mined - so if you've got any suggestions as to where I look next, let me have them. If you like the newsletter, please do some of these things:
- Visit the VLM Fetchpoint site: http://londonmarathonfetch22.webs.com/
- Send a link to this newsletter to friends and club mates, post it on your club forum, tell *EVERYONE* about it.
- Add a prediction of your VLM time, even if it's just an estimate, and keep logging your training.
- Let me know if there's anything you'd like me to try to cover in future weeks - there's a discussion thread
Happy Running,
Ian Williams aka 'Fetch'
Editor, www.fetcheveryone.com
