Marathon Newsletter Week 8

Dear Marathon Runner,

Week 8 might signal the halfway point in your training programme, and maybe surprisingly, it also marks the halfway point in your mileage, according to the stats I unearthed in week 5. Sure, your longest runs are still in front of you, but so is the teeth-gnashing, cotton-wool-wrapping taper. So well done, we're in the eye of the storm now folks.

Time for the weekly round up - 668 Fetchies listed for VLM now. Can I just say quickly that yes, I know there are other marathons, and that some of them are just as long :-) Anyway... back to the story... 458 of you ran (that's a drop of 25 from last week - I hope you're all ok and not injured - as a group we did see quite a hike in mileage last week), with a median mileage of 29.93 (up 0.8 miles on last week), median long run of 13.2 (I'm reckoning many of you did halves the previous week, so there's probably a lot of cutback going on). Right then, let's get the voting from the Danish judges:

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 49.8 43.7 33.8 37.5 24.1 24.3 22.5 23.0 20.5
Average Pace (mins/mile) 7:26 7:47 8:21 8:43 9:12 9:20 9:38 10:01 10:50
Longest Run 16.4 13.4 13.1 14.3 14.8 13.0 13.1 13.1 12.4
Longest Run Pace (mins/mile) 7:41 7:48 8:21 8:52 9:15 9:20 9:33 10:06 11:08

Some big shifts to report here. All the sub-4 groups seem to be taking a cutback week, with all four groups cutting around 3 miles from their longest runs. The 5:00 group seem to have gone into overdrive, adding 2.5 miles to their longest run, and goodness gracious, slowing their longest run down by nearly 30s per mile - has anyone done that because of these newsletters?

My random mid-newsletter tip for this week is to start planning now to choose your race shoes for the big day. If you can, find a pair that are fitting really nicely, with maybe 100 miles on the clock, and put them aside, maybe running in them once a week. Meanwhile, buy another pair, and you can run them into the ground, safe in the knowledge that you'll have friends on your feet on the big day.

Completely reneging on last weeks promise, I've decided instead to look at how training is broken down by category i.e. how many of the miles run are devoted to speedwork, how many to long runs, etc. A lot of runners are happy to use the "General" category for everything - either for simplicity of logging, or simply because that's all they do. I've no problem with that at all, but to provide some value to the folks who like to mix it up, I'm looking at all the marathon performances where the runner has dedicated less than 75% of their mileage to "General". I've also made a few generalisations of my own, grouping intervals, tempo runs, fartleks etc under "speedwork", and so on. The idea is just to find some trends. Anyway, enough talk, here's a table showing the percentage of overall mileage that each group spends doing each activity:

Percentage Mileage By Category3:003:153:303:454:004:154:304:455:00
General434742454445465052
Hills122222221
Long Runs202224232422222021
Off Road222223222
Races799111214161614
Speedwork1210111098765
Warm-up & Recovery1599776655

If I were to make some generalisations from this data, the first I'd make is that faster runners tend toward the specific (although I know of at least one sub-3 who bucks that trend). The amount of "General" declines as we go up the pace scale, but there's also an increasing amount of time spent on warm-up and recovery, suggesting that the faster runners make sure they go out with a real firm and specific purpose for each session. There's also a definite increase in the proportion of mileage devoted to speedwork, and a decline in the amount of mileage spent racing (see week 6 for a bit more detail on this) - the latter I see as an indication of increasing focus on the goal race.

That's all from me for this week - as usual I'm really pleased to hear your thoughts on the stuff I've put forward, and also to receive any suggestions for topics for future weeks. It would be great to turn this analysis into something that happens every week on the site, but to do so will need your input as I'm not made of stats you know! Please do some of these things:

  1. Visit the VLM Fetchpoint site: http://londonmarathonfetch22.webs.com/
  2. Send this newsletter to friends and club mates, post it on your club forum (might give some of them a laugh if nothing else), and tell *EVERYONE* about it.
  3. Add a prediction of your VLM time, even if it's just an estimate, and keep logging your training - I hope to squeeze plenty of motivational stats out for you.
  4. 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