The Long Road Home - Individual Lessons

I think I'll bring this series to a close (before I start talking about new plans) with a few things I learned along the way, usually painfully.


Because everyone asks a runner about marathons, I've trained for quite a few and never run a good one. I've spent decades finding ever better ways for a 5K specialist such as myself to run them, but the fact remains that I'll never be good at them. And 100 milers are much worse. Typically, people who can run a marathon in 3:00 can run a mile in 5:30; for me, three hours is more equivalent to breaking 5:00 in the mile, which is much, much harder. Currently, most people who break 3 in the marathon can also break 5 in the mile, but that's because they could run a 2:45 marathon, but don't train or race hard enough. And that seems to be a generational thing - I get it: you don't get anything extra for running 2:45 that you don't get for running 3:00 (or 4:00... or 6:00), so what's the point of killing yourself?


On the other hand, training for 1500/5000m, which is probably where I'm best, I always get hurt, take a long time off, start over, get hurt again. All the years of training have shown me something: I do best with few hard runs, though I LOVE to run fast. Coming off an injury, I don't know what shape I'm in, so I run what feels good, surprise myself, and repeat that for another 4 days. It turns out that I can run hard 5 days in a row; but then I get hurt. Long-term, I can only run hard twice per week (and a long run, for me, counts as a hard run). Earlier this year, when I thought of running short track races, I was running hard all the time and it didn't work. It's standard to run hard on Tuesday and Saturday, but then try to squeeze in a "moderate" day on Thursday and an "easy" long run on Sunday, but for me, that's 4 hard runs.


My best mile races came off 3-4 weeks of specific training, mostly time trials, trying to figure out what kind of shape I was in. If I'd had racing opportunities, that'd be enough.


What I need to do is run what feels easy most days, with a couple of hard runs each week (which, at my age, are mostly hill repeats) and race 1500-5000m frequently when I feel I'm in shape to race.


That, obvious as it is, only took 100000 miles and 40 years to figure out.