Oct
5
Akron Marathon Post-Mortem and Lessons Learned
I find it valuable after any major endeavor to go back and compare the results to expectations, and identify the major drivers of any differences versus “the plan”. Whether for work or running, and whether the effort was a success, failure, or something in between, the value of the experience is compounded by candid reflection. It is only through taking a critical eye towards our projects that we can really find opportunities to make significant gains in future initiatives.
With that in mind, I’m going to look back at my Akron Marathon experience, from formulating the goals and plan through execution of the training through the completion of the race itself and identify what went well and what didn’t, and use what I learn to improve my planning, training, and hopefully results at the 2011 Boston Marathon. We all tend to be our harshest critics, and there will be plenty of ideas as to what can be improved; the challenge is to focus on the “critical few” into which we should put our greatest focus, as we can’t afford to try to improve everything at once, and if you make too many changes simultaneously you lose the ability to identify the change that really ends up making the difference.
At a high level, the Akron Marathon was a success; while falling short of the (later established) stretch goal of 3:00, the 3:03:26 finish time slightly beat my initial goal of 3:04, which is over half of the gain needed from my 3:08:48 finish time at Cleveland to reach 3:00 at Boston. I underappreciated the challenge of the Akron course (an immediate lesson learned that can apply to Boston as well), and am confident that on a flatter course a 3:00 result may have been well within reach. However, even in the face of the challenging course, there were certainly some strategic errors made, and that is where I will focus first.
I had laid out an “even splits” plan calling for maintaining a 6:50 pace through most of the first 17 miles, until encountering the hills at 18 and 19. While the idea of running even splits is fair, the expectation of precisely delivering them on the rolling hills of Akron is unrealistic. I should have established more of a “range” of splits (say 6:45 – 6:55) to allow for the slopes and mentally focused on “even effort”, not “even splits”.
Even allowing for such a range, I clearly went out too fast once again. As I detailed in my race report, I even acknowledged warnings from another runner that we were going to fast. You can see the evidence portrayed graphically in the charts below, that show absolute splits versus the plan as well as the per mile and cumulative “deltas”. By mile 15, I was nearly 2 minutes ahead of the target pace, just as the hills began, and I clearly had to “pay that back” at the back end of the marathon. If you are a data junkie like I am, click the charts below to expand and see the details for splits versus the plan and the resulting difference (i.e., how far ahead, than behind, plan I was).
Akron splits compared to the plan and Cleveland 2010
Difference between splits and plan for Akron, showing the effect of going out too fast
After a first half of 1:27:57, the second half came in at 1:35:29 (which, in a testament to my training, is actually the fastest second half of a marathon I have ever run, despite the hills). So here’s the big question: would reserving that extra 2:00 in the first half have had a >2.5 multiplier effect on my back half – i.e., save 2:00 early and gain 5:30 later? It seems a stretch to think so on such a tough back-end of the course, yet “Tracy”, who I mentioned in the race write-up, did achieve negative splits in her race and, as near as I can tell from Athlinks, this resulted in a marathon PR for her.
The impact of the "Rally from the Valley" at mile 18.5
Moving from strategy to what I think is usually the second most impactful area, the planning, I think that there are some limitations to the Hal Higdon approaches on which have, to date, built my training plans including the one for Akron. I think Hal’s approach works great up to a point (it has carried me, with some modifications, to 3 BQ’s now, so I can’t complain). However, I think I have “outgrown” (for lack of a better word) his plans, so I am going to look for alternatives to shore up what I feel are his deficiencies in tempo runs and long runs. On the former, I think Hal doesn’t call for enough long tempo runs, generally peaking out at around 20-25 minutes at a progressive pace finishing with your 10K effort. This seems a bit too easy for marathon training, and I’d like to mix in some longer 5+ mile tempo efforts in the future. On the latter, Hal subscribes to the “long slow distance” (LSD) approach to long runs, perhaps “allowing” you to pick the pace up a bit at the end. I’d rather find or build a plan that embeds more marathon pace miles near the end of a long run. I clearly still hit a wall in the 20-23 mile range at both Cleveland and Akron and need to get better at maintaining pace in the face of fatigue. Hal’s plans really don’t do that well; he does emphasize doing a long run the day after a marathon-pace medium-length run, but by emphasizing doing it slowly, any fast-finish endurance-building effect seems lost. I’ll build the plan later (I have two months until the start of Boston training, plus need to figure out what rhythm works well considering my new job) but am reading Pete Pfitzinger’s Advanced Marathoning
And finally, let’s look at the execution of the plan. While I described a few minor bumps that I had hit early in the training cycle involving missing my goals on long and marathon pace runs, these were rectified in the second half of the training. I do think a few modifications I made, both intentionally and spontaneously, to the balance of interval / hill / tempo training resulted in too much focus on 800m intervals (as I also analyzed previously), at the sacrifice of quality 1600m intervals and tempo runs. But other than that, the strength and hill training went well and played a major factor in being able to finish with the 1:35 second half, and I hope to keep both as a major element in my Boston preparations.
Done with Akron, moving on to Boston and a still-3:00 goal
In summary, I think that executing my race strategy would have gotten me significantly closer to the 3:00 stretch goal, but I’m not sure that my training prepared me well enough to actually meet 3:00 on the Akron course. It may well have been too aggressive of a goal to set, but I still believe that, in doing setting such a goal, I still achieved a better time than I would have had I continued to aim at the original 3:04 goal. After stepping things back a bit to focus on setting a new half-marathon PR at the Cleveland Fall Classic, I look forward to implementing more tempo and marathon-pace work in my training for Boston this winter.
