Back to the Future

I having being trying to analyse my recent GC performance. For some background here is my series of marathon races including My Wife's times.

3:48:53 02/05/1982 Birmingham (UK) My Wife 3:54:24
4:05:40 24/10/1982 New York (USA) My Wife: 4:05:40
3:11:45 20/03/1983 Guildford (UK) My Wife: 4:15:43
3:05:58 05/08/1984 Gold Coast My Wife: 1:53:13 (Half)
2:53:45 21/07/1985 Gold Coast My Wife: 3:49:00

3:27:07 09/04/2006 Canberra
3:44:31 02/07/2006 Gold Coast - ran with an injury
3:18:26 01/07/2007 Gold Coast

First Marathon

Second Marathon Finish

The first thing to note is My Wife and I started running together in early 1981 and certainly up until out third marathon 1983 did all our training together. Our aim for the first marathon was just to be able to run all the way without stopping. I achieved that but My Wife didn't quite make it and had to do a bit of walking near the end. For our second run in the New York Marathon, we vowed to go the distance together, which we did. In our third race, we started together but after 10k, she wasn't feeling great so I took of on my own and surprised myself with a 3:11 and my only evenly split race so far. Returning back to Australia, we continued to run together on most training runs and always together on long runs. There was no speedwork, no intervals, the occasional fartlek session and some hill sessions in the last couple of months before the race. So my long runs were always very easy paced for me ( 5:15 - 5:45 range), as were many other of my training sessions. Weekly totals were in the 70 -80 k range. With this sort of training I was still able to get to 2:53 by 1985.

Fast forward to a different century, and just before Canberra this year I mysteriously get a hamstring injury. With only 12 weeks to GC things looked grim but I was determined to at least get to the start line. A couple of weeks of no running and then many weeks of slow conservative runs, very deliberately not trying to put to much pressure on the recently injured leg. It took six weeks before my training pace goes under 5:00 min/k. By this time I am up to 90k a week.

The next 4 weeks sees rapid improvements in my pace at set Heart Rates and a week before the marathon , I run a 41:56 10k (4:11 pace) even though my fastest training pace has only been 4:28.

The rest is history and I was able to pull out a 3:18 much to my surprise. In fact, I reached one of my most sort after running goals and that was to do an age-equivalent PB. I often though that if I ever achieved that I might give the marathon away and stick to shorter races but I know I was under prepared at the Gold Coast this year and I can certainly do a lot better. And I intend directing all my efforts into next years race. And Ewen , 12 months can go by quicker than you think.

Now the link between my two racing eras seems to be lots of slow running. In the first case just because I used to loved going out and running with My Wife. (Somehow I think I used to like it a lot more than she did.) And in the second case, because I was trying to protect a recently injured leg. It certainly gives me a lot of confidence to stick with the Lydiard/Hadd approach as it has worked for me in the past and still appears to be working well for me.