Subtypes and Thought Experiments

One of my favorite things to ask when coaching: Imagine you're running with a group and you've gone a little farther and a little faster than your typical training run. Now you're given a choice; you can either run one more mile but it has to be the fastest mile of the day or you can run two more miles at any pace. Almost every distance runner I know will automatically go for 2; some will even slow down. A few will "just go with the flow" and see what happens when they get to the next mile marker. I will always choose to go faster; in fact, I'll keep speeding up because, once I've invested the extra effort, I don't want to risk it.


These divide people pretty accurately into groups. The first are best at races longer than a half-marathon and their races times are in line with what Jack Daniels has published in charts of equivalent performances; these I'll refer to as "marathon types." The second group are about equally good at most distances and their times fall in with the Gardner/Purdy charts or with age-grading equivalency; these I'll call "distance types." The third, including me, are best at short distances (but usually not sprints) and I'll call them "miler types."


Now imagine you're the marathoner type and, if you ran your best, you could run a marathon in exactly three hours. Imagine that I too could run 3:00 at my best. If you look at mile race times, you see the biggest differences between the groups. You might run a mile in 5:30-5:40, as predicted by Daniels and some others. A typical distance runner, using the Purdy chart would run about 5:15, which fits in with Jeff Galloway's 1.3X rule (5:15 x 1.3 = 6:50/mile marathon pace, just under 3:00). I would come in at just under 5:00 in the mile, which is what was found typical of sub-3 hour marathoners in a 1973 poll and was found typical of sub-3 runners using Strava recently.


So, we both run a mile race and I trounce you. At 5K, I'm still way ahead. I'm still better than you at 10K and just a little better at 1/2 marathon. You'd expect that I'd run faster than you in the marathon, but we're both 3:00 marathoners. But it should be easier for me to break 3, right? No - it's exactly the same for both of us. You can't run under 5:30 in the mile and that time's a cakewalk for me, but the 3:00 barrier's the same for both - it just doesn't seem right at first.


What if you're the marathoner type and we run the same time for a 10K? I'd be faster than you at the mile, but slower at the marathon; I'd be running 3:00 and you about 2:50-2:55. This was a problem for me almost 40 years ago. I figured the guys that I could beat in shorter races would be good training partners for me and good pacers for the marathon, but I'd end up going out too fast with them and dying.


What's even stranger when you look at these performance curves is that, if we use the same training schedules, every training run would be easier for me. You'd think that would make the marathon easier, but it doesn't; the differences become smaller with distance and I'd be only a little better in runs over 22 miles - but how many of those does anyone do in training?!


What's problematic for me is that, even though the individual runs might be easier for me, the transitions are much harder. Plans tend to increase miles, not increase pace. A plan might have one run 9-10 miles at marathon pace, then 2-3 weeks later run 12-13 at that pace, then 15 at that pace and then the marathon. Each of these runs (except the race) is easier for me, but the increase from one to the next is gradual for you and a huge leap for me. Added to this s that plans frequently ramp up mileage from 45 to 65 miles in a few weeks and those increases are much harder for me. So, I'm constantly getting hammered by harder and harder days and weeks, when you feel it's a gradual improvement. When race day comes, I'm overworked and undertrained!


Practical consequences of this should gradually become apparent as I proceed through these posts.