So Iâve had more time to think things over, and Iâve got a train ride ahead of me; figured Iâd jot down some more fully-formed thoughts about this.
Before I get into it, I should note that itâs become increasingly clear to me, from talking to other runners and seeing how they operate, that people are different when it comes to ideal training, racing, and recovery. There are some general principles that apply across the board, but there are all sorts of questions where no consensus has emerged despite decades of increasingly scientific practice by elites. Frank Shorter capped his long runs at 20 miles and says he aimed to finish his speedwork sessions feeling like if he had to do one more rep at pace, gun to head, heâd end up eating the bullet. Eliud Kipchoge runs up to 40K, including sometimes doubling on LR days, and says he never gives more than 80% of his total capacity at any given session.
With that in mind, these are the four main lessons Iâm taking away from my Boston cycle.
LESSON ONE: no going to the well during tempo runs. In hindsight, I can pinpoint where my cycle went off the rails. The period from 8/23 through 9/5 is the strongest Iâve ever felt as a runner. I got my weekly mileage into the 80s with two workouts and quality in the long run, and I finished the LRs feeling strong. One of my workouts was 4x2 miles with 2-minute jog recoveries, and I ran the last two a little faster than lactate threshold without redlining. Then I got greedy. It was a little early to be peaking, I told myself, so I needed to do even more. The following Tuesday I ran 10x1000 harder than LT with 1-minute jog, then on Thursday I tried to run 3x3 miles at HMP cutting down to LT or faster on the last rep. I should not have finished that rep. I struggled to hit HMP, I faded despite putting forth a race-level effort, and a witness says I had quite the hitch in my giddyup (though nothing felt off at the time).
Thatâs just not where you want to be when youâve got a LR two days later and another two big weeks before your taper. It was a peak-week workout when if anything I should have considered taking a cutback week (which would have been my only one of the cycle).
I think thereâs a case to be made for taking the Shorter approach to, well, shorter speedwork sessions, at least on occasion, because a hard 400 or even 800 isnât long enough to do serious structural damage. Tempos are a different story. I basically ran an all-out 5K on wrecked legs.
LESSON TWO: if youâve dug too deep, stop digging. Although I felt okay afterward, that third rep was a red flag: it was the first time during the block my body had raised the white flag, and I knew my form had been compromised. I should have immediately backed off a bit, but again stubbornness and greed prevailed. I returned to the well that Saturday, grinding out a 3-mile fast finish at the end of my LR.
After that, I never felt great again. I developed overuse issues in my glute and hip. Every single run was a grind or worse. I had crossed that red line from damaged (in the good, precursor-to-supercompensation sense) to broken (though I was not acutely injured), such that even an aggressive taper was insufficient to fix me. At Boston, my legs felt bad from the start.
You may be wondering what I was thinking. That makes two of us. I think a couple things were going on: one, I was looking at each run in isolation. A 3-mile fast finish in itself is no big dealâbut it is when you overdid it two days before. Two, I had convinced myself that I wanted to take a high-risk, high-reward approach in pursuit of a PR. So the standard good adviceâtake three days off, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cureârang hollow.
Accordingly, I kept at it, hoping Iâd strike gold and recover without any significant cutback. Nope. I ended up eventually taking a rest day, and then a more substantial taper, after I found myself limping during a cooldown. Too little, too late.
LESSON THREE: donât get carried away with long runs. There are two rules of thumb Iâve repeatedly come across that make sense to me: one, donât ever run for longer than you expect your goal marathon to take; two, cap your long run at 30% of your weekly mileage. But itâs still possible to overdo it within these constraints, because LRs are so taxing. Iâve read that once you go past 90 minutes, and especially once youâve burned through your glycogen stores (roughly two hours), the marginal physiological cost of running goes way up (unless youâre going at a recovery/ultra pace, which is too slow for marathon training purposes). There are real marginal benefits as well, but whatâs most important to marathon success is total volume and consistency. This is why Frank âLonger Is Overratedâ Shorter never went further than 20âhe didnât want to risk having to cut back one of his other days, resulting in a net loss of mileage and maybe also a worse workout.
I suspect I ran afoul of this lesson as well: there were three weeks in a row when I went longer than 22 miles, and on one of those days I tacked on a 1.5-mile âcooldownâ to get home. What if instead of some of those super-taxing later miles I had turned a couple of my easy days into medium-long runs?
LESSON FOUR: have an honest conversation with yourself about risks and rewards. I feel like this comes down to (i) really thinking through and visualizing the various training and race-day scenarios and (ii) being realistic about the probabilities. I have often found myself thinking and saying things like, âall I care about is a PR! Iâd rather have a 5% chance of PRâing and a 95% chance of blowing up than a guaranteed solid day.â But Iâm not sure I always actually believed them. Blowing up sucks! Finishing strong is great! And what if itâs really just a 1% shot at a PR?
Moreover, a do-or-die mentality can encourage death in training, as it did in my Boston build. Iâm okay with the approach I took on race dayâit didnât seem out of the question that my legs would hold up, and it was exciting to be in race modeâbut I really wish I had been more conservative during training. Never again will I seriously risk showing up at the start line injured or beat up.
Happy to hear any thoughts, and thanks for reading!