Madcap 3: The Long Hard Run

One of the challenges of the marathon is running a steady hard pace for the duration of the marathon. Almost all top coaches will say that you can train to run the first 20 miles, but after that it's a crapshoot. That might be because of the way they train their runners.

In Jack Daniels' book (I haven't read the 3rd edition yet), he has marathoners run a longest run of "22 miles or 2.5 hours, whichever comes first." He has runners do a maximum marathon paced run of 15 miles. This doesn't really get one ready to run 26.2 miles at marathon pace.

There's a workout he doesn't consider, called the long hard run, generally for marathoners about 20 miles done at marathon pace plus 10%. Brad Hudson includes these runs in his marathon schedules in the back of his book, but he never mentions them in the body of the book, because they don't fit in well. Yet, there they are.

Renato Canova has said that training slower than marathon pace just trains one to run slower than one needs to run in the race. It could be argued that running faster than marathon pace just leads one to go out too fast and die (which was always my problem). Canova has runners do as much as 30-35km at marathon pace - with much rest before and after - and that might make sense for someone running 140 miles per week or more. Also, 20 miles at 5 minutes per mile is less than two hours and it's easier to run hard for two hours than it is for four; 4:30 marathoners would need twice the recovery of 2:15 marathoners and that would be long enough to be unmanageable in a workout schedule.

If you run at 90% effort for 90% of race distance (in this case 26.2x0.90=24 miles), it takes as long as the race. 24 miles at marathon pace plus 10% will take you as long as the marathon will. That's a useful thing to know. If you can finish all 26.2 at that pace, it's still about 91% race effort, which is about what 10 miles at marathon pace is. It's hard, certainly, but it's possible to fit into a plan.

So, a runner hoping to break 3:00 in the marathon would run a marathon in 3:18 as a training run - and do it regularly. That sounds insane at first. If one builds to it gradually, though, with adequate rest before and after, it should be okay. The other thing that one would need to work on is running at marathon pace itself, and that's the next post.