Sub 3h15

Can someone turn up the central heating in this new house - it feels very cold at the moment!

10 relaxed miles this morning (5.15 start) but it took about 15 minutes for my hands to warm back up again - next time it's I'm going back to 2 pairs of gloves. Lovely clear sky so plenty of time for me to do a bit of constellation spotting (although I can really only identify about 4 or 5!)

KR - congrats on getting on the short list. My vote's in.

Got a book on sports nutrition for my birthday - haven't started reading it yet, so felt it was still OK to have a bowl of Coco Pops before going to bed last night! Suspect I'll have to have a few healthy food related New Year's resolutions.

Lorenzo wrote (see)

Got a book on sports nutrition for my birthday - haven't started reading it yet, so felt it was still OK to have a bowl of Coco Pops before going to bed last night! Suspect I'll have to have a few healthy food related New Year's resolutions.

Lorenzo, if you are interested in learning your constellations try this bit of free software. 

I enjoyed a star lit 5m steady 6am run this morning. Would have been bright if the moon was out, but just about enough light to make out the road, although I did turn on the head torch around the usual bits of road where ice is likely.

You kept that very quiet KR! You have my vote.

FINgers wrote (see)

Just want to chip in on the MP debate. P&D indeed only have a small amount of MP running in their plans but I think that is, in part, made up for by the fact that 1, they prescribe a fair amount of what they call General Aerobic running, which I loosly translate to SS running. And 2, they don't advovate running long runs as LSR but at a pace that is harder than that - quoting directly from the web article as I don't have my book here:

The most beneficial intensity range for long runs is to gradually increase from a slow early pace as you warm up, reaching 20% slower than your goal marathon race pace at five miles and accelerating to 10% below marathon pace during the last five miles of the run. At this intensity range, a 22-mile long run will take approximately the same amount of time as your marathon.

I think that this helps to prepare you for MP pace to a certain extent and I suppose is a progression on the mid-week progressive runs that a lot of us do.

I was worried before VLM this year that I hadn't done enough MP running by following P&D and also following Liz's advice to MM on the ssx thread. My worries were primarily that I would be able to recognise the correct pace and have to concentrate too hard on making sure I maintained it correctly - in the end that wasn't the case at all and MP came quite comfortably to me. However, towards the end endurance failed me and my pace did drop quite a lot but I think I can put some of that at least down to glycogen reserves...

Based on a MP of 7:27, MP+20%=8:56 and MP+10%=8:11, which is more or less the same as Easy.

Also, the instructions on pace for General Aerobic runs in P&D are very woolly. Deliberately so? I think it says it can be anywhere from tempo to the slower end of easy. I'm currently using the P&D endurance cycle as a very loose guide as I build up my weekly mileage and so I'm keeping the general aerobic runs very easy (c. MP+20%).

Like the look of the new thread guys

Windy - I think the consensus is P and D is light on MP work....In my view getting up to 10% below MP just isn't as good a stimulus. At our level that's still more than a fair few seconds per mile and the difference feels quite significant

One of the issues I always struggle with is perceived effort during training versus when racing ie MP can feel really quite tough some days in training and utterly unsustainable for 26.2. Presumably everyone feels that and it's not just me being a soft lad. I suspect that's been behind Ant's approach of going relatively quick for a substantial proportion of his runs to reasurre yourself you're not being wildly optimistic about what pace you can sustain.

Snow is vaguely melting here - wowser

Thanks for the votes guys.
Hope the illness doesn't offset the good base building you have achieved so far B&B.

The bootcamp last week was to show we good do what we siad we could i terms of ace etc.
All the 40 people were spilt into groups according to hopeful MP finish time. The first track session we did with Bud was at percieved MP pace.
400m at MP (and 30 seconds recovery) - 1.50
400m at MP (and 30 seconds recovery) - 1.48
800m at MP (and 60 seconds recovery) - 3.35
1600m at MP (and 90 seconds recovery) - 7.02
2000m at MP - 8.45

These felt very comfortable and knocked these out @ 7.00mm pace. I know this was quicker than MP pace, but when you in a group trying to show what you can do it's hard to hold back. I know some of the others were trying quite hard as well.

We then went inside had a break then it was on to physiotherpy advice / strecthing / an injury issues etc which was followed by our gait analysis.

After lunch, and I think I should of held back on the Jaffa cakes, we did another track session with Steve. After a warm up and a few strides we did a 5k time trial setting off together - I think there was about 10/12 in our group. The twist to the time trial was we did 400m @ 10k/5k pace then 100m “recovery” @ MP pace which made up a 500m block. We then did 10 of these blocks in succession to make up 5000m. This started off relatively ok and it was quite clear after 3 laps who the big boys were! 2 of the sub 3 hour hopefuls had opened up a slight gap on me and held on to their pace well throughout as they should have done. I came in third in 20.26, which given the conditions underfoot being very slushy, wasn't too bad.

Not a bad day really and I think a good way of them finding out if people can do waht they say they can.

Morning all.

I have done my SS voting.  I couldn't possibly say who I voted for in the 3.15 category, but I hope he's successful

Agree that the sub-3 aspirants look like a surprising selection; I'm guessing that there are better HM/10k pbs than the marathon times suggest.

10M for me last night, ave 7.42m/m, including a good burn up Bridge Valley Road - my favourite hill - which goes on for about 500 metres.  I'm either acclimatising to the weather or it was actually relatively mild last night, as I got so hot I had to take my hat and gloves off.  Crazy times! 

In terms of training, in the summer I did more MP work than I had before and it did leave me feeling very strong.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a chance to see how much benefit I'd got from it, seeing as the half-marathon I ran wasn't fully tapered (and only 6 days after a 22 miler with 12M @ MP in it!) and the marathon was a headstand, post man flu and weather induced nightmare. 

Am starting to think (having fallen off the P&D wagon with man flu) that I might actually re-try my summer schedule for the spring and do a bit more MP work than P&D envisage.  I know that 60-65M pw seems to be my mileage sweet spot in terms of work/life balance.

You see, Moraghan, we're all capable of very long posts round here

That sounds like a challenge Joolska!

Just flicked through my P & D.  Their general aerobic runs description is indeed woolly!  I try and avoid going quicker than easy range on non-workout days in an attempt to preserve the quality of the quality sessions.  If I am continually holding back too much on non-quality days and still getting the quality done (and have been doing both for a while) I tend to regard that as an invite to do more mileage or perhaps do a little more on quality days (or do some more non-running stuff if impact is an issue).

Moraghan wrote (see)

That sounds like a challenge Joolska!

Just flicked through my P & D.  Their general aerobic runs description is indeed woolly!  I try and avoid going quicker than easy range on non-workout days in an attempt to preserve the quality of the quality sessions.  If I am continually holding back too much on non-quality days and still getting the quality done (and have been doing both for a while) I tend to regard that as an invite to do more mileage or perhaps do a little more on quality days (or do some more non-running stuff if impact is an issue).

Well done on making the shortlist KR - I think the fact that you're the sole male out of the three should work in your favour

Lot's of interesting debate on MP and P&D. 

Windy wrote (see)

As I'm flicking through a typical P&D schedule, and having previously taken a "lace up the daps and run" approach to training,  why don't they write training programmes in the same language, so I'm assuming in P&D terms  "general aerobic" is equivalent of "steady state" as referred to by Moraghan. 

But there seems to be a lack of MP mentioned in P&D, in the 55-70 (18wk) schedule MP is only practised in week 9 and week 13 in a LSR, then a 2m dress rehearsal during the final taper week.   (SBD as resident P&D guru help me out here).   Is P&D light on this?  Would you advocate ramping up MP practise for the LSRs??

Perhaps I need to resign as thread "P&D guru"  All I can say in my defence is that, having never trained for a marathon before and being devoid of any natural speed, I used the P&D training programme to nail 3:05 and 2:59 in successive marathons in 2010.  Whilst you need to tailor a training programme to your strengths and weaknesses, my approach was to follow P&D to the letter to see what worked and what didn't work.  So far I haven't found much that didn't work

I interpreted General Aerobic as "a bit faster than recovery pace" but essentially time on feet.  I ran these no faster than the recommended MP+15% but capped the effort according to HR as well (75% WHR).

Is P&D light on MP?  I think there are 4 MP in LSR sessions with the last 8, 10, 12, 14 miles at MP.  If I've done these as training runs I've usually struggled to hit MP but if I've run them as part of a race I've usually gone faster than MP.  For this campaign, I've got 5K, 9mile and HM races lined up for each of these sessions.    I'll probably aim to do the first 2 at goal MP and the latter 2 at slightly faster than MP.

I always ran the LSRs and MLRs using the 20%/10% progressive approach.  That said, whilst at the beginning of the schedule the faster last 8 miles was at MP+10%, as the campaign progressed this pace increased (I would aim to run this at just below marathon pace HR) and reached MP+2% just before the taper.  So I may have been guilty of running a lot more MP miles than I thought

Totally OT from P&D at the moment... why oh why does it seem my legs always ache a lot more after a "recovery run" than after the hard session that I did previously!...ouch.

Ok... so back to P&D - as far as the GA runs that they suggest - I treat these as "just go out and run" runs - as SBD says - basically time on feet runs, not as slow as recovery but not hard either... you know, just a run.

Matchstick Man wrote (see)

How many quality workouts do you / your charges do per week? Is it the same irrespective of the distance you train for or not? Your last sentence is resonating with me quite a bit at the minute

2 main quality workouts typically irrespective of distance.  Will also add in some strides at other times.  For those at shorter distances the strides might turn into a slightly more focused turnover / basic speed session.

Some can handle a 3rd quasi-quality session whilst others operate better with a main quality session and a second quality session which has less volume than a typical quality session (e.g. 5 * 1k @ 10k pace rather than 8 * 1k @ 10k pace).

I was having so much trouble fitting things in that I went to a 10 day cycle.  Now I'm having to take a few days off because I ran my legs into the ground.  We all have our limits and they change ever year - especially when you're an old fucker like me!

Agree with TR - half of the battle is being consistent and believing in what you do.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that noticed that one of the sub 3s is going from a 3.27 mara!

You have to assume he can run 1.15ish for a half.....