Madcap 2: A History of Failure

It's often said that the way to train for an ultramarathon is to train like you would for a marathon, but with longer long runs. I ran my first - and fastest - marathons training for 10K's. This was pretty typical for the 1970's (info traveled slowly and I was a decade behind):

Monday 60 minutes
Tuesday 90 with long intervals
Wednesday 60
Thursday 90  with short intervals (usually ignored)
Friday 0
Saturday 60 with a race, ususally 10K
Sunday 150-180 minutes

I ran 2:40 that way (with 32 minute 10K's on the way). This was pretty typical for college runners at the time, but what I didn't know was that, when training for a marathon, they'd run 4-8 weeks of specific marathon training and then a 2 week taper; the Saturday race would become longer (first 15k/10 mile, then 20K/1/2 mar./25K, then 30K/20 Mile) and less frequent, with the intervals run longer and slower and with less recovery.

I'd have no idea what I could run for a marathon, so I'd go out at what felt like a comfortable pace, then die and struggle in to the finish. If I started slower, hoping for an even pace, I ended up running slower overall. The problem was that I never did any specific training.

Other madness

One of the things I felt I needed was more rest before a long hard run, so I created a plan that looked like this:

Monday 90 minutes hills, sprints
Tuesday 90 with 4x 1 mile @ 5K
Wednesday 30
Thursday 30
Friday 30
Saturday 90 at marathon pace, or race (1/2 marathon, usually)
Sunday 150-180

This let me be completely fresh when running on Saturday. The Saturday run would deplete my glycogen stores. The Sunday run was necessarily slow because of this, but I figured I would adapt to running with low energy stores. Monday used muscles differently. Tuesday was hard and when maximally fatigued, so the times were always poor and sometimes only 1 or 2 miles could be done. It was a perfect glycogen depletion and repletion strategy... it was just not a great plan.

The run no one speaks of

What I really needed was what is rarely discussed seriously - a long hard run. That's the focus of the next post.