Currently I am about halfway through the Chicago 2016 training cycle.
Intermediate races planned, all hard training efforts:
8/20/16: Druid Hills 10k
9/11/16: Parks half marathon
Goal race:
10/9/16: Chicago marathon
Currently I am training well, barring a couple weeks of lower intensity/maintenance work due to two separate two week vacations. One of those I maintained well and got 80+ miles, the other I ran nearly every day but was also at high altitude (8000+) the entire time so it probably balances out.
Training from here on out barring any interruptions will be fairly straightforward. Almost all workouts will be marathon-specific or supportive, as best as I can manage in this east coast summer weather. The occasional shorter speed workout might creep in, but only if I have an awkward time gap between workouts and I haven't done something quicker in a while. The goal will be to run 14x every week and something near 120 mpw. I do not expect to do this week in and week out, but it is always the goal to shoot for.
Currently the fitness is right on track. This past week featured brutal heat and humidity with at least one day setting or tying a record. I still managed a solid long run workout both weekends and a 45 minute hill workout midweek. The bad weather ended up paying some acclimation dividends; during my long run this past weekend, the dewpoint was a normally intolerable 74, but during a long hard workout in which I took nothing in for over 2 hours I felt unaffected and smooth averaging 5:35 pace for a 17 mile workout, which converting to an ideal marathon race setting converts right to my goal pace. These consistent long workouts set the stage for the super specific workouts which will start in the coming weeks. I want to be able to get more miles in the fast long runs as well as getting some good volume in workouts faster than goal marathon pace.
I want to try and get at least 6 weeks of specific marathon work in, which ideally means 12 workouts. My goal pace for this cycle is 5:20s (2:20 marathon) so these workouts could be some of the following, with all kinds of possible permutations on these:
4 x [4 miles @ 5:20 / 1 mile @ 5:40-5:50]
6 x [2 miles @ 5:05 / 1 mile @ 5:40-5:50]
3 x [3 miles @ 5:10 / 1 mile @ 5:40-5:50]
10-13 miles @ 5:15-5:20
20 miles @ 5:30
24 miles @ 5:40
Obviously these are pretty lofty. If the summer weather keeps up at this level I doubt I'll be able to hit all of these, but I have no problem modifying them for weather because I know my goal pace of 5:20 wouldn't hold up if Chicago was hot and humid.
If I can fit anything else in, these workouts would be supported by some of the following:
50-60 minutes of hill repeats
7-10 mile repeats under 5:00 pace
overdistance runs (26-28 miles with no goal pace or time)
And an infinite variety of shorter speed workouts to work on running efficiency at speed and make 5:20 pace feel slow.
I believe one of the important concepts with long distance workouts, in my case half and full marathon training, is the importance of no true recovery periods in the workout. In classic interval training for track races, true recovery is necessary to many sessions because it's impossible to do, for example, 10 x 400 at mile pace without some amount of true recovery. Since the marathon is so much less intense in terms of heart rate and energy systems used (specifically lactate production and oxygen debt) it becomes both possible and practical to incorporate workouts in which the "recovery" between harder efforts is only 30s a mile slower or so than the pace of the hard segments. I first started working out like this when training for my first serious half marathon in the fall of 2013 and felt that it made a huge difference in my fitness and ability to handle a hard, fast pace for a long time. That's my rationale for all of those interval workouts listed above.
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