Madcap Marathon Plan - intro

Every now and then, I get a weird idea about training. I jot it down and store it for a while and usually it's flaw is immediately and laughably apparent when I next look at it. Sometimes, though, it seems to make sense; most of the time, if I go through my notes, I've covered the same thing before (sometimes more than once). It's good, though, to test the limits of what you think you know; for example, when I took to ultramarathons for a decade it was mostly because everything I thought I knew no longer had any bearing on what I was trying to do.

The idea I have isn't fully formed yet and I've started looking at what might be issues with it already, but before I present it, I need to go over its origin. So: back to when I was at my peak in my twenties, but never did a great marathon. I was able to run the distance - I ran 20 milers every week. I was able to run fast (32 minute 10K). I couldn't run a good marathon, though, because I couldn't do the one necessary thing, i.e. run marathon pace for marathon distance.

The last time I tried to run a good marathon (1993) was disastrous. I'd figured the problem was that I needed to run 13-15 milers at marathon pace during training, but that was so close to 1/2-marathon pace (within 15 seconds per mile), that I was never sure which I was doing. I'd enter a 1/2-marathon and run what felt like marathon pace, get my time and then wonder if that really was my marathon pace. If I did an all-out 1/2-marathon race, I'd wonder if maybe I had a bad day, or whether I was in shape to race 13 miles, but not 26.

That's the issue I have with plans like the Jack Daniels Plan A, where the first time you run at marathon pace, you run 12-13 miles at that pace. You have to know what your marathon finish time will be before you run the marathon, but my fitness fluctuates dramatically and I never know. If you can already run a 3 hour marathon, you don't really need someone to tell you how to do it.

What I needed was a plan where each workout gives a benchmark for the next one and they're all predictive of marathon finish time. One such workout frequently mentioned is to run 10 miles at an easy pace, then ten miles hard (some say with each mile faster than the one before it) and those final 10 are then your marathon pace... this will appear in my plan.