Madcap 4: The Pace Run

One of the challenges of the marathon is running a hard steady pace for the entire distance; that's what I covered last time. Another is running marathon pace at the end of a marathon and that's today's post.

A workout that's become popular (and which I mentioned before) is to run 10 easy miles, then 10 miles at marathon pace. That might not get you to the finish line, though, so I'm suggesting a slightly harder workout: a full marathon, with the last 10-11 miles at marathon pace and the rest easy.

The question is (other than "what are you smoking, Steve?") what is marathon pace and what is easy pace? That's where the previous long hard run comes in. Your time in the long steady run at 24 miles divided by 26.2 is marathon pace; alternately, your time for the full 26.2 miles times 0.9 and then divided by 26.2 is marathon pace.

Your final time for both of these runs should be the same, so you can work backward to get your easy pace. Start with the total time, subtract the time at marathon pace, then divide by the distance run at easy pace.

For a 3 hour marathoner, the two runs look like this:

26.2 miles at 7:30/mile
15.7 miles at 8 minutes per mile, plus 10.5 miles at 6:51/mile

There's only one more step to this plan - and you won't believe what it is. That's the next, final post in this series.