There's an old saying that the marathon consists of two halves: the first 20 miles and the last 6.2. In this edition of LET'S TALK TACTICS, I'm going to argue that that's exactly how you should run your next marathon.
Bearing in mind that this is a series dedicated to learning from elite competitors, I want to take a look at two breakthrough races illustrating this tactic:
First, Galen Rupp became the first American male to win the Chicago marathon since 2002 (and first American-born male since 1982), coming through in a time of 2:09:20 -- off of a 1:06:10 first half. That's an incredible negative split, especially when you consider that most of that momentum came during the final 10k -- the second half of the second half.
Rupp demolished the field by shifting gears and scorching five straight sub-4:40 miles after mile 21: 4:39, 4:35, 4:30, 4:34, and 4:33. That's a textbook application of this tactic.
Just a few weeks later, Shalane Flanagan followed with an even more inspiring win by employing the same tactic (and becoming the first American winner of the New York City Marathon in 40 years). She has always been one to go for it, which has often left her fading at the end after serving as a de facto pacesetter; however, this time a more patient approach paid off.
After a first half over 1:16 -- and first 20 still over 2:30 pace -- the screws started to turn and it quickly became a three-person race. From 22 to the finish, Shalane split 5:09, 5:08, 5:11, 5:04, and 5:12 (which averages out to a 2:15 marathon pace!). And most of the those miles were in Central Park, which is definitely not flat and fast. In so doing, she utterly dropped one of the greatest women's marathoners in history, Mary Keitany, who had run a women's-only world record of 2:17:01 in her previous marathon.
So the tactic here is: run at a steady but slower-than-goal pace for the first 20 miles of the marathon, and then shift gears over the last 10k and empty the tank. This requires supreme patience, but if you train for it and then execute it effectively, you'll be surprised how fast you can run at the end of a marathon.
Read any training manual or article about marathon pacing, and they'll all say the same thing: to run your fastest, you're best off clicking even or slightly negative splits -- not drastically negative like this.
While that may be the accepted recommendation for pacing a marathon, you shouldn't be interested in pacing; you should be interested in racing. It's a subtle difference, but pacing is a very rigid practice (doing exactly what the preconceived watch says), whereas racing is much more responsive to your body and your competition.
Call me old school, I believe that as long as you are entered in a race, you ought to be truly racing it, even if you're not one of those challenging for the win.
In actuality, perfectly even or slightly negative split pacing is extremely difficult to nail; most people aren't able to do so, which leaves a race profile with gradually positive splits. Instead of running strong to the finish, most people end up fading at best and crashing at worst. From a mental standpoint it's a discouraging way to race, and from a physical standpoint it often leaves you fairly beat up.
Employing the 20/10 tactic requires you to trust your training and listen to biofeedback -- admittedly, in the age of GPS and heart rate, that can be a tough skill to learn. But you won't ever have an arbitrary time on a watch imposing an upper limit on you. Finishing fast has an obvious mental benefit -- it's so much more invigorating to be passing people than to be the one being passed -- but it also has a physical one: you can recover from the race quicker. Hear me out: when you fade at the end it's partly because your muscles are fatigued, so you run with lazy economy which is extremely stressful on your muscles and tendons. But when you finish fast, you are presumably doing so slightly more fresh and with a more economical stride; essentially, you are firing your muscles in the way that you trained to do so, which should leave you much less sore.
Like any tactic, it does take the right type of training to nail this on race day. The obvious stand out is the long run: you need to do regular fast-finish long runs, even if that only entails the final mile or two of up-tempo running.
You also need a healthy does of classic hard interval workouts, almost 5k specific type of stuff. I mean, you can't run fast on race day if you've never practiced approaching the pace in workouts.
However, there are two workouts that are less common that might actually be more important for your performance: regular progression runs and alternating fartleks.
Progression runs are simple: start very easy, and then over the course of your run pick up the pace until you are just below your red line for the final few minutes. You can do this over any distance, from a short 20-minute session to a full 20+ mile long run. You should never go over the edge in this workout, although especially your first few times you might and that's okay -- how else will you find that edge?
Alternating fartleks are a page out of the Canova book, but they've been around forever. Australian legends Steve Moneghetti (Mona fartlek) and Rob de Castella (Aussie/Deek's Quarters) both have famous workouts in this style, and Alberto Salazar regularly ran an eight-mile session with a hard mile followed by a "recovery" mile at sub-5:30 pace. Scores of other great runners have used various versions of the alternating fartlek for years. The whole point is to practice shifting gears off of a fast pace -- and then settling back into a steady fast pace. It resets your baseline as to how fast is sustainable over the long term. Besides, there's no rest and recovery in a race, so don't practice it in training.
If you can nail those workouts, then you can nail this tactic on marathon race day. You'll be surprised how fast you can run on tired legs at the end of a race, and furthermore, you'll be surprised how fast you actually finish overall adopting this approach instead of the standard even-splits strategy. There's no feeling quite like rolling people up at the end of a race.
Previous edition of LET'S TALK TACTICS:
50/50 Surge
Bearing in mind that this is a series dedicated to learning from elite competitors, I want to take a look at two breakthrough races illustrating this tactic:
First, Galen Rupp became the first American male to win the Chicago marathon since 2002 (and first American-born male since 1982), coming through in a time of 2:09:20 -- off of a 1:06:10 first half. That's an incredible negative split, especially when you consider that most of that momentum came during the final 10k -- the second half of the second half.
Rupp demolished the field by shifting gears and scorching five straight sub-4:40 miles after mile 21: 4:39, 4:35, 4:30, 4:34, and 4:33. That's a textbook application of this tactic.
Just a few weeks later, Shalane Flanagan followed with an even more inspiring win by employing the same tactic (and becoming the first American winner of the New York City Marathon in 40 years). She has always been one to go for it, which has often left her fading at the end after serving as a de facto pacesetter; however, this time a more patient approach paid off.
After a first half over 1:16 -- and first 20 still over 2:30 pace -- the screws started to turn and it quickly became a three-person race. From 22 to the finish, Shalane split 5:09, 5:08, 5:11, 5:04, and 5:12 (which averages out to a 2:15 marathon pace!). And most of the those miles were in Central Park, which is definitely not flat and fast. In so doing, she utterly dropped one of the greatest women's marathoners in history, Mary Keitany, who had run a women's-only world record of 2:17:01 in her previous marathon.
So the tactic here is: run at a steady but slower-than-goal pace for the first 20 miles of the marathon, and then shift gears over the last 10k and empty the tank. This requires supreme patience, but if you train for it and then execute it effectively, you'll be surprised how fast you can run at the end of a marathon.
Read any training manual or article about marathon pacing, and they'll all say the same thing: to run your fastest, you're best off clicking even or slightly negative splits -- not drastically negative like this.
While that may be the accepted recommendation for pacing a marathon, you shouldn't be interested in pacing; you should be interested in racing. It's a subtle difference, but pacing is a very rigid practice (doing exactly what the preconceived watch says), whereas racing is much more responsive to your body and your competition.
Call me old school, I believe that as long as you are entered in a race, you ought to be truly racing it, even if you're not one of those challenging for the win.
In actuality, perfectly even or slightly negative split pacing is extremely difficult to nail; most people aren't able to do so, which leaves a race profile with gradually positive splits. Instead of running strong to the finish, most people end up fading at best and crashing at worst. From a mental standpoint it's a discouraging way to race, and from a physical standpoint it often leaves you fairly beat up.
Employing the 20/10 tactic requires you to trust your training and listen to biofeedback -- admittedly, in the age of GPS and heart rate, that can be a tough skill to learn. But you won't ever have an arbitrary time on a watch imposing an upper limit on you. Finishing fast has an obvious mental benefit -- it's so much more invigorating to be passing people than to be the one being passed -- but it also has a physical one: you can recover from the race quicker. Hear me out: when you fade at the end it's partly because your muscles are fatigued, so you run with lazy economy which is extremely stressful on your muscles and tendons. But when you finish fast, you are presumably doing so slightly more fresh and with a more economical stride; essentially, you are firing your muscles in the way that you trained to do so, which should leave you much less sore.
Like any tactic, it does take the right type of training to nail this on race day. The obvious stand out is the long run: you need to do regular fast-finish long runs, even if that only entails the final mile or two of up-tempo running.
You also need a healthy does of classic hard interval workouts, almost 5k specific type of stuff. I mean, you can't run fast on race day if you've never practiced approaching the pace in workouts.
However, there are two workouts that are less common that might actually be more important for your performance: regular progression runs and alternating fartleks.
Progression runs are simple: start very easy, and then over the course of your run pick up the pace until you are just below your red line for the final few minutes. You can do this over any distance, from a short 20-minute session to a full 20+ mile long run. You should never go over the edge in this workout, although especially your first few times you might and that's okay -- how else will you find that edge?
Alternating fartleks are a page out of the Canova book, but they've been around forever. Australian legends Steve Moneghetti (Mona fartlek) and Rob de Castella (Aussie/Deek's Quarters) both have famous workouts in this style, and Alberto Salazar regularly ran an eight-mile session with a hard mile followed by a "recovery" mile at sub-5:30 pace. Scores of other great runners have used various versions of the alternating fartlek for years. The whole point is to practice shifting gears off of a fast pace -- and then settling back into a steady fast pace. It resets your baseline as to how fast is sustainable over the long term. Besides, there's no rest and recovery in a race, so don't practice it in training.
If you can nail those workouts, then you can nail this tactic on marathon race day. You'll be surprised how fast you can run on tired legs at the end of a race, and furthermore, you'll be surprised how fast you actually finish overall adopting this approach instead of the standard even-splits strategy. There's no feeling quite like rolling people up at the end of a race.
Previous edition of LET'S TALK TACTICS:
50/50 Surge
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