January 8th, 2009
Continuing my between-cycle search for out of the ordinary (for me, anyway) running entertainment, yesterday’s treat was a 7-mile Progression run. Brad Hudson or Greg McMillan will tell you they’re a surefire way to get a little extra aerobic aerobic improvement out of an easy run without the need for recovery. Plus, they’re real fun.
Here’s Mcmillan’s Progression Run page, if you’re interested.
A great byproduct of the zippier runs I’ve been up to lately is that they’re introducing me to potential marathon goals for next Fall. When I trained for Steamtown, the only time I ever ran marathon pace was on the two MP runs Pfitzinger had in his plan. That pretty much sucks, because if you’re feeling like crap that day or even for that matter, feeling amazing, two tries seems like a dinky sample for such a huge event.
Which is why I’m an official race-pace convert now (and this extends to all race distances). Whether it occurs in the form of intervals, tempos, steady state or part of a long run, I’m all about rehearsing race pace as part of the training block.
So it occurred to me that my faster easy runs these days double as a kind of audition process for future marathon pace. I mean, not really truly quite yet, because it’s way too early, but it’s pretty cool to be running 8:xx and think, “yeah, gimme 11 months and I could do this for 26.2″.
Back to reality and the calendar, Hudson’s Half plan was supposed to begin this coming Sunday. However, because my mileage and workouts are already ahead of his basebuilding phase, I’m going to jump into his plan a bit later, continuing on my own for now, though including his progression runs and hill repeats in the interim.
It’s strange, doing a truncated plan before a goal race – I’m so used to having 16 weeks laid out for me – but I realize that’s a mental thing, it’s not like I won’t be training well these next few weeks – six weeks, actually. His threshold runs don’t even begin till week 7, so in essence, the main Hudson contribution will amount to a 10-week plan.
Looks like Excel and I will be spending some quality time together as we figure out how best to fill in the blanks. Good thing I love that stuff.
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I hear you on the MP runs. I am falling back to a Higdon Intermediate plan (with some Progman specific modifications) this time around. 11 out of the 18 weeks Hal has you do a MP run the day before your long run which is roughly half the distance of the long run. I think I kind of like that approach to incorporating speed work, and it will let me (hopefully) bump up the weekly mileage safely as long as I train by HR and save the speedy stuff for Saturday. This approach was brought up in that RWOL “Running Carb Depleted” thread by Jim2 also – another thread which spawned controversy (god I love that place).
Doesn’t Pfitz incorporate MP miles into some of his longer runs though?
I like that about Higdon’s marathon plan, the MP run before the LR, leaving your legs a little used for the LR. Smart stuff. Pfitz only has the two dedicated MP runs – the LRs don’t have anything extra in them. His MP runs for the 55 plan are 15 miles w/12MP and 17 miles w/14MP.
The carb depleted thread is entertaining, but it comes up every 6 months, so by now I know what everyone’s opinion is on it before they even write it.
I LOVE progression runs. They can be very very useful and mentally satisfying. Last year before Steamtown, I used the 18 mile race in Central Park as one long progression, picking it up every 6 miles. By the last 6 miles, I was passing everyone in site.
I think this time around I’m going to pay less attention to the HR and run everything a little faster.
Good plan, doggie. I’ve started wearing my HR monitor again so I can get a better idea of where my paces lie, but I don’t like to rely on it either.
The case against long MP runs is that they have to be recovered from, or you’re gonna get hurt, but I assume you’re not planning anything long. I find that MP seems fast when I’m training, but not so much in the race. Am I alone in this? Maybe I should do more MP running too. And Progression runs, although we sometimes inadvertently accelerate on our group runs. We call it the “Horse returning to the barn effect” because there’s breakfast at the end of it.
This is true. The Pfitz workouts were great unto themselves, real workouts. I’m thinking when I do this the next time, I’d add a few MP miles into LRs every now and then. We’ll see, I haven’t really looked closely at Hudson’s marathon plans yet. I remember the MP miles were very tough during training, though now I’m surpassing that pace all the time, I wish it felt this easy back then.
Lol, “Return to the barn”, that would work for me, too.
Perhaps they felt tough at the time because of everything else building up to them. It’s not like we were doing them well rested. My first one was great, my 2nd one ended with me crying on 125th st.
Not pretty.
And the summer heat didn’t help. OTOH, my average weekly mileage is higher now than it was during marathon training and my training pace is 30+ seconds faster now, too. Definitely seeing fitness gains.