Week 3 - Marathon Training
Ten minutes after finishing his first 5k Turkey Trot, my buddy Cody was still showing signs of his mid-race adrenaline.
“I freaking love to compete,” he said as we walked back to my truck. His voice was intense; he may have pounded his chest. We had yet to start our cool down and maybe he was still a bit out of breath, but he still was not short on words. “I’m telling you,” he said, “I have learned so much about myself and what I am able to put my mind and body through. I’m a better man, a stronger person, more disciplined, and that’s all from running.” He was so excited I thought he might punch me.
Make no mistake, Cody is a proven athlete. He’s been a football player, an offensive lineman at that, for almost half his life. He played in junior high, high school, and four years in college. He is no stranger to hard work, nor to intense lifting sessions in the weight room.
But he pointed to something different with running. “With running,” Cody said, “you’re on your own. It’s just you and the road, and that’s when you learn what you’re made of.”
So true. You can’t call timeout in long-distance running. You don’t share the race with teammates. It’s a community event, but individually competed.
Week 3 - Training Record
Monday - 7.3 mi Easy
Tuesday - 8.0 mi w/ 6 mi Progression Run
Wednesday - 5.0 mi Recovery Run
Thursday - 6.5 mi w/ 5k Race
Friday - 6.6 mi Easy
Saturday - 8.1 mi Long Run
Total - 41.6 miles
Like Cody, I love to compete—and there are not many opportunities for a 51-year-old with limited athleticism to engage in competition. So I savor what chances I get. What I get from running is the same thing Cody raved about: a disciplined work habit that shapes the ability to perform a feat beyond my expectation.
Week 3 is still early. I have five months until the Eugene Marathon, so I hold that race in the distance of my mental horizon. I’m focused on what I can do today to be better for tomorrow—what I can do this week to be better for next.
Critics might suggest it was unwise for me to run a 5k race so early in my base-building phase, but I am an advocate for racing when you’re mind says you need a race. Besides, it was Turkey Trot, and therefore hard to take seriously as a genuine race. I want to avoid feeling stagnant in the base-building phase and an occasional race—especially a short one, like a 5k, that is not even an eighth as long as a marathon—piques the mental edge and serves as a reward for following a regular training regimen.
I organized my week around the race, even though my plan was to run it in a controlled effort. My plan for the week was to sustain or slightly increase my mileage and use the race as a speed-endurance workout.
After an easy run on Monday that covered a bit more mileage than planned (7.3 miles as opposed to 6.0), I assigned myself a Progression Run workout for Tuesday. There is very little structure to running a progression run—no rest intervals, no specific time targets, just the feel of getting faster. My approach is to start with an easy pace and let myself get faster each mile. The trick is to leave room at the beginning of the progression, and not progress so fast that you don’t have room at the end. After a one-mile warm up, I set the goal to run six miles continuously, with the last mile somewhere between 7:00 and 7:10.
Mile 1 was 7:53.
Mile 2 – 7:38.
I was feeling good. No stress. Face felt relaxed. Shoulders loose. This is the fast side of an easy effort for me. The second mile was my marathon goal pace.
Mile 3 – 7:24.
Mile 4 – 7:17.
I was running out of room. With two miles left and a goal to get down between 7:00 and 7:10, I was running the risk of finding a point where I might level off, and if I did I would have to sustain that effort. This early in my training plan, I am not sure where my limits are when it comes to aerobic strength. So I increased effort again.
Mile 5 – 7:04!
For some, this might not seem like much, but it was the pace of my 10k PR that I ran a year ago. I went for it.
Mile 6 – 6:53!
I finished more refreshed than exhausted. I never felt out of control. Could I have gone another mile at that pace? I wanted to. But that will be a test for another day.
Week 4 - Training Plan
Monday - 5 x Mile Tempo Repeats
Tuesday - Easy
Wednesday - 2 x (4 x Hill Sprints)
Thursday - Recovery
Friday - Marathon Goal Pace Run
Saturday - Long Run
Sunday - Off
A workout like this confirms for me that my aerobic base is continuing to grow. At some point I will do a progression run that is twice as far as this, but for this week it would serve as a gauge for how to approach the 5k on Thursday.
Ending a six-mile progression run at 6:53 suggested to me that I could run a sustained effort for three miles without needing a day or two of recovery. I’m still building my mileage volume, so I wanted to run fast but not so fast that I could not run six miles on Friday and eight on Saturday.
There is only one problem with a race: you always end up running faster than intended. The adrenaline factor—the very thing that fired up Cody throughout and after his race—makes running at a faster effort feel easier. This is especially true for the first third of a race.
I tried to stay under control. A guy with a turkey hat took off in front of me. Normally, I don’t like the idea of a guy in a turkey hat beating me, but I told myself to wait until the mid-point of the race to chase him down. I was aiming for even splits in a race that had a steady incline in its second mile.
Mile 1 – 6:48. Easy, effortless. Strange how effort in a race is so much easier than a workout.
Mile 2 – 6:53. I passed the guy in the Turkey hat, then kept my effort even. The field was coming back to me, as so many people went out too fast in their first mile.
Mile 3 – 6:41. It’s hard not to settle in the middle of the race. You think you’re running as fast as you can, but then the finish gets closer. You realize there is more in the tank.
One final turn and a kick to the finish left me with a 5k time of 21:08. Good enough for 4th in my age group (out of 40).
My personal best as an adult is 20:42, and that was after three weeks of race-specific workouts. I have run under 21-minutes two other times, run 21:03 once, and matched this time twice. In the past ten years I have run twenty-two 5k races, and this is the third time I have come away with a mark of 21:08.
So even though I’m three weeks into my training, and even though I ran the 5k race at a controlled and even effort, and even though I was racing people who were wearing turkey hats and pilgrim attire, I still managed to run a time that matched my fifth fastest effort of my adult life.
I am convinced that a few more races at shorter distances this year will increase my speed endurance entering the marathon, and that will make a difference—so I have two more 5k races on the calendar, one on Christmas Eve and another in mid-January.
As for next week, I’ll return to a workout from my first week of training—mile repeats at tempo effort—and measure my improvement.
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