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Once more into Wednesday Wellness with some commentary on running that I think is mildly interesting and somewhat counterintuitive for those that aren't into endurance sports. Last month, another user successfully knocked out their marathon goal and I mentioned that as my miles were ramping up this fall, I was thinking about a full marathon prior to winter, and someone mentioned that I should have the underlying fitness to complete a marathon. They're correct, but I think there's a bit of a misunderstanding, and it's something I've bumped into with a few people that run a bit, but not really at great length, and not at race efforts, and it's a perception that running a marathon will tend to be at a slower pace than usual running, dropping down to accommodate the longer distances. While I'm not particularly good, I do run a fair bit and like to push my race times as close to optimal as possible, and this is quite far from true for me - my easy days are roughly an 8 minute/mile pace while my marathon pace is faster than 7 minutes/mile and my half marathon pace is ~6:15-6:20/mile. The challenge is not in running 26.2 miles, that's something I can roll out of bed and do at an 8-minute pace without any real trouble, it's in maintaining the faster, full-effort pace for the entire race. As you scale up through elite runners, these effects become more pronounced, with easy efforts remaining fairly slow and marathon efforts getting faster and faster.
So, anyway, despite the fact that I'm feeling pretty well, I won't be running a full marathon in 2023 because I don't feel that I've done the relevant training to put in a legitimate effort at the distance. Instead, I'll settle for a small half marathon to close out the year, try for one more personal best, and see what happens.
Okay, we're operating on different levels here.
I am not a natural athlete by any means, but I am not overweight and do fine with resistance training and mild aerobic exercises like kettlebell swings. Is there a trick to running they forgot to teach me? Because I feel like an incel who's told to just be himself and talk to girls more.
Genes..they matter a ton, as much for g-loaded tasks as they do for physical fitness, whether it's endurance sports or strength sports. Even in high school, from what I can recall, about half the boys in my class could not run a mile without stopping. It was not because they were obese , but for whatever reason lacked the stamina to do it. Some ran it easily, and it was not like the faster-milers had put in '10,000 hours'. Practice does help, but there is still huge individual variance that cannot be accounted for by practice.
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As with so many things, the first couple things to do are (1) be fast and (2) don't be slow, just like the trick of talking to girls while being handsome!
Seriously though, one of the things I enjoy about the sport is that the individual variability is so high that you really have to just compare yourself to yourself without getting too carried away with what others are doing. When you go all the way up to the top levels, you're looking at Kelvin Kiptum running a marathon at a 2:51/km average pace, which is just otherworldly to me. I can maybe hold that pace for 800 meters. Even local elites are so much faster than me that nothing I can do is going to make me remotely competitive with them. The underlying physiology for that is a combination of muscular power, oxygen utilization, running economy, and neuromuscular coordination. Such is life!
That said, if you want to get faster, the biggest thing to do is just running a lot of miles at an easy pace. While initially counterintuitive, the bulk of endurance adaptation that is plastic is from aerobic fitness, with the relevant adaptations triggering from slow, aerobic activity. For me, that means roughly 100K/week of running when a training cycle is going well and more like 65K/week when recovering and maintaining general fitness. If I could handle it without injury risk, I'd do a lot more, but I have trouble going above that without things getting dicey. I also run track intervals and tempo workouts, but the majority of my improvement is just from a decade of running consistently. When I started, my easy pace was something like ~6:00/km, and it just gradually got faster at the same intensity level, both by subjective feeling and heart rate.
Have you considered a car? /s
God made some shank's ponies faster than the others, Henry Ford ran them off the road.
I have repeatedly been informed by People of Wheels that even a bike is substantially faster than failing to have any form of conveyance other than my own feet.
I am somewhat confident that the average American couldn't keep up with Kiptum even riding a bike, especially not for two hours. On the other hand, breaking an hour in the 40km time trial is a common status hurdle for competitive cyclists, and is not even twice as fast.
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I ran at a D1 university. after getting out of college, I took a break from running, then planned to get back into it and really train for a full marathon. Any time an opportunity came up, I passed on it because I wasn't prepared to run my best possible marathon. A wife and kids later, I'm in my mid 30s and have never run a full marathon, and will never run my best marathon.
One of my running buddies was a 4:08 miler in college and ran with his D1 team up through 10K cross-country and doesn't have any real interest in local races for exactly that reason - he's older, chunkier, and slower, so those college times are never coming back and he has no impulse to post slower times with a tradeoff of increased injury risk. Instead, he's just a pretty fast dude that cruises with whatever pace group before we all get a beer.
I don't know whether I'm unfortunate to lack that experience or lucky that I get to keep getting faster, but I didn't start running until my late 20s, so I don't have these problems! I have enough experience to treat marathons very differently than every shorter distance though, so I don't have any real impulse to run another when I'm not up to going hard (I've run 5 at actual race effort, a couple more that weather/injuries didn't cooperate and scrapped that plan, and a couple more after that as a pacer). At some point, I won't be able to get any faster and I'll have to think about whether I want longer distances, age-graded goals, or something else, but for now I'll keep working on it.
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I did not run at a D1 University, but was fit in college, and got my Marathon done right before graduating to check off the box haha. Knew it was only going to get harder from there.
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If you ever run a marathon, you will have run your best marathon.
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