JoggerNatz’s next MooooOOOooves in 2012

My next big marathon in mind is either Camsur Marathon or Sydney Marathon on September.  Both of them are AIMS certified, which can be used for qualifying for the Boston Marathon. 

My sister Genevieve, who’s now in Australia, is encouraging me to run in the Sydney Marathon. She’s also inviting her College friend Kat Kat, a very motivated runner from Kabankalan and she wants me to train her for the half-marathon, which I think she’ll debut in a decent time.  

Genevieve, Me, and Katkat, struggling up McKinley hill. Thanks to LeStSkY Photography

I’m thinking the climate there would be much cooler than what we have here in the Philippines, during that time it would probably be spring there and the temperature would range from 10’C to 18’C, perfect for the marathon. In comparison, our temperature here in Manila would be 27’C to 32’C on September at the Camsur Marathon.  In my experience, running in Belgium at 13’C temperature shaved 5minutes off my 21Km PR. We could expect around 10minutes faster times for the marathon. Following the trend-line I’ve made in my previous post, I should be around 3:23 by September (assuming my training goes well for the next few months), and running in Australia should improve that to 3:13 - still 8minutes slower than Boston.  Another sure way to get faster is to lose more weight – lose 8pounds and I should finish at 3:03. There, now I’m qualified!  No I’m just kidding, improvements do not sum up easily like that, and at 135pounds, I find it extremely difficult to lose more weight.  3:13 can be a realistic goal in Australia though, but it looks like those bridges could be quite some hill challenge.  I obviously need to add hill training to my program.

I’m planning to follow an 18-week Marathon Training program that should start on May 7^th. But what should I do 3 months leading to that? Well right now I’m still on a 5-week post marathon recovery program, where from almost zero mileage, I would gradually increase my mileage to 41miles/week in the end – @Feb12. Then, I could either do a base mileage build-up, or train and race for shorter distances. Let’s see…

Lydiard High Mileage?

At first, I thought of doing the classic Lydiard High Mileage Training, and that 100mile/week (160kms/week) is alluringly challenging.  I have often fantasized on training this much, what I could often hear elites could only achieve, and what kind of aerobic benefits I could get out of these perplexingly long distances the human body could cover in short periods of time.  “Breakthroughs” in racing times, I would often hear, would result in these mammoth kinds of workouts when 100miles/week were consistently applied for several months or even years. 

Arthur Lydiard

 I was already contemplating of doing this until yesterday; my father approached me and showed me a paragraph in Timothy Noakes’ book “Lore of Running”.  Noakes said that after 125Kms/week (77miles/week) of regular training programs, they found little or no benefit in increasing training workload. In fact, he said that he and some of his colleagues found that when they have increased their weekly mileage too much, there is a point where they noticed they aren’t creative or productive in their day jobs anymore. Running too much stresses them that there are hormonal imbalances that distorts their way of thinking,  their mind, therefore affecting their jobs, not meeting deadlines, and even affecting their family relationships.  Wow thank goodness I have a dad who is wiser than me, who knows how to hold me back when he thinks I’m going overboard with my running.  I would like to see how much I could push myself in running, right now I don’t have much responsibility – I’m single, no kids, middle aged man (Oh man, I’m such a loser aren’t I?) and my job right now has a great schedule to allow me a lot of free time in the morning even if I wanted to run 100miles/week. However, reading Noakes’ book (sounded like notebook, doesn’t it), I would never want running to affect my mind, or my brain, at least in a negative way. I may become an amazingly fast runner, but if this alters my behavior in a bad way, it changes who I am, my soul. Now it would sound like I’m selling my soul to the devil.  It’s simply not worth it. 

Train and race shorter distances first

To run under 3:05 in the marathon requires that I run in an average of 7:03/mile. To be honest, this is exhausting pace for me. I’m probably at the limits of my lactate threshold at that pace. Gee, that sounds redundant.  I cannot imagine being able to sustain that for 26.22miles(42.195kms). Heck, why do we need to have both metric and imperial units?  My top end speed is not much faster than this.  Therefore, I believe I badly need to improve my speed and lactate threshold if I dream of running that fast in the marathon.  Because of this, it may be a good idea to train and race for 5K and 10K for the meantime, prior to the 18week marathon plan. A well balanced runner should be a able to handle speedy 5K’s up to the long endurance marathons. I believe training in one end can benefit the other in some ways especially if we aren’t specializing yet.  

Honestly, I feel that the 5K is my weakness, the improvements year after year here seems to be a lot smaller. But racing in this distance, the intensity of running faster than 6:20/mile(3:56/km) - gasping for air, longer strides, faster leg turn-around, arms pumping hard - it is here that I feel I’m truly running.  My 5K and 10K personal records last year were 19’40” and 42’xx”.  Improving that further, I may even get some place in the podium if I race in a not-so-competitive field. I'm now being challenged to do a sub40minute 10K. By myself. But assessing my current race times, a sub40 is going to be difficult for me for now.  Hopefully with good training I should be able to do it 4 to 5months from now.