Most of this chapter deals with the physiological attributes that most directly determine your marathoning success. Traits such as your lactate threshold and
O2max. can be measured; if we were to gather 10 readers of this book and run them through a series of laboratory tests, we could reasonably predict their order of finish in a marathon.
What we couldn’t so easily measure and predict, though, would be which of those runners would come closest to reaching their physiological potential. That’s where the mind comes in. Just as there are wide variations among runners in attributes such as percentage of slow-twitch muscle fibers, so too are there great ranges in the less-quantifiable matter of what we’ll call, for lack of a better word, “toughness.” We all know midpack runners who have a reputation for thrashing themselves in races; at the same time, most followers of the sport could name a few elite runners who often seem to come up short when the going gets tough.
Despite being unmeasurable in a scientific sense, mental toughness can be improved. In fact, it’s one of the few determinants of marathon performance that you can continue to better after even 20 or more years of running. Maturity, years of training, and some positive reinforcements along the way can enhance such necessary weapons in the marathoner’s arsenal as perseverance and willingness to suffer in the short term for long-term gain.
Nurmi also said, “Success in sport, as in almost anything, comes from devotion. The athlete must make a devotion of his specialty.” Having a challenging but reasonable marathon goal provides you with the necessary object of devotion. Intelligent, thorough preparation for that goal – such as that provided in the training schedules in this book – provides the confidence to attack that goal. Do the right training, and both your body and your mind will benefit.
Runners vary in how many workouts they can tolerate in a given time. Recovery runs are an important element of your training, but they must be handled carefully. If you do your recovery runs too hard, you run the risk of overtraining and reducing the quality of your hard training sessions. This is a common mistake among distance runners, particularly marathoners – many runners don’t differentiate between regular training runs and recovery runs. The purpose of your regular training runs is to provide an additional training stimulus to improve your fitness; the purpose of your recovery runs is to help you recover from your last hard workout so that you’re ready for your next hard workout.
Recovery runs improve blood flow through the muscles; this process improves the repair of damaged muscle cells, removes waste products, and brings nutrients to your muscles. These benefits are lost, however, if you do recovery runs so fast that you tire yourself out for your subsequent hard training sessions. In addition, by doing your recovery runs slowly, you use less of your glycogen stores, so more glycogen is available for your hard training sessions. Optimizing your diet to enhance recovery is discussed in chapter 2. Recovery runs and other strategies to improve your recovery are discussed in depth in chapter 3.
How to Train to Improve the Key Physiological Attributes
Now that we’ve discussed the physiological requirements for successful marathoning, let’s look at the components of training that improve the key physiological variables and how to do each type of session most effectively in your marathon preparation. Of the six physiological variables we’ve discussed, all but muscle fiber type improve with the appropriate training. In this section, we’ll look at how to train to improve your lactate threshold, ability to store glycogen and utilize fat, running economy at marathon pace, and
O2max. We’ll also consider a specialized training session that integrates the various aspects of your training. In chapters 2 and 3, we’ll look at strategies to enhance your recovery from this targeted training.
The most effective way to improve lactate threshold is to run at your current lactate-threshold pace or a few seconds per mile faster, either as one continuous run (tempo run) or as a long interval session at your lactate-threshold pace (cruise intervals or LT intervals).
These workouts make you run hard enough so that lactate is just starting to accumulate in your blood. When you train at a lower intensity, a weaker stimulus is provided to improve your lactate-threshold pace. When you train faster than current lactate-threshold pace, you accumulate lactate rapidly, so you aren’t training your muscles to work hard without accumulating lactate. The more time you spend close to your lactate-threshold pace, the greater the stimulus for improvement.
Lactate-threshold training should be run at close to the pace that you can currently race for 1 hour. For serious marathoners, this is generally a 15K to half marathon race pace. Slower runners should run closer to a 15K race pace on tempo runs; faster runners should run closer to a half marathon race pace. This should be the intensity at which lactate is just starting to accumulate in your muscles and blood. You can do some of your tempo runs in low-key races of 4 miles (6 km) to 10K, but be careful not to get carried away and race all out. Remember that the optimal pace to improve lactate threshold is your current LT pace and not much faster.
A typical training session to improve lactate threshold consists of a 15-to 20-minute warm-up, followed by a 20- to 40-minute tempo run and a 15-minute cool-down. The lactate-threshold workouts in this book mainly fall within these parameters, although most of the schedules include one longer tempo run in the 7-mile (11 km) range. LT intervals are typically two to five repetitions of 5 minutes to 2 miles (3 km) at lactate-threshold pace with 2 or 3 minutes between repetitions.
For runners competing in shorter races, tempo runs and LT intervals are both excellent ways to prepare. For marathoners, however, tempo runs are preferable to LT intervals. After all, the marathon is one long continuous run, and tempo runs simulate marathon conditions more closely. There’s both a physiological and a psychological component to the advantage of tempo runs. The extra mental toughness required to get through a tempo run when you may not be feeling great will come in handy during a marathon.
The most accurate way to find out your lactate threshold is to be tested at the track or in a sport physiology lab. During a lactate-threshold test in a lab, you run for several minutes at progressively faster speeds until your lactate concentration increases markedly. The tester measures the lactate concentration in your blood after several minutes at each speed by pricking your finger and analyzing a couple of drops of blood. A typical lactate-threshold test consists of six increasingly hard runs of 5 minutes each, with 1 minute between runs to sample your blood. By graphing blood lactate concentration at various running speeds, physiologists can tell the pace and heart rate that coincide with lactate threshold. You can then use this information to maximize the effectiveness of your training.
The lower-tech method to estimate lactate threshold is to use your race times. For experienced runners, lactate-threshold pace is very similar to race pace for 15K to the half marathon. Successful marathoners generally race the marathon 2 to 3 percent slower than lactate-threshold pace.