Running metric (2)

Back in 2012, I wrote about using the location of the trend line of my race results relative to the percentiles as a metric for my running progress. Another, simpler metric is the pace of easy training runs.

Many years ago in grad school, when I wasn't really training, my easy pace was about 8:00. A few decades later, that has become my tempo pace (!). I've run all my life (since high school), but it wasn't until around 2008 that I began to regularly race and routinely train. By then, my easy pace had slowed to around 10:00-10:30. Over the next 4-5 years, I managed to only bring that pace down to about 10:00. Then, at the end of 2012, I signed up for the Winter Marathon Program (WMP) offered by my local running club, which was when I began to "seriously" train for races, especially marathons. During 2013-14, I ran a total of eight marathons, and my easy pace dropped to around 9:20-9:30, within 30 seconds of my Boston qualifying (BQ) pace or goal marathon pace (GMP) of 8:58. Currently, I'm on an out-season schedule, in between Harrisburg last November and Pocono coming up in May. My most recent two long runs (first two of 2015) perhaps showed that my easy pace is now within 10-15 seconds of my GMP. Of course, these were just medium long runs. Jan. 4 was a recovery week run of only 10 miles, and Jan. 11 was 14 miles. Whether I can sustain this pace, as the long runs lengthen towards 22 miles is uncertain. But, I do feel quite good about where I am in my training, two weeks out from the start of the 16-week cycle for Pocono, especially the 14-miler. Aside from the annotated slower miles in the pace chart, there was only one mile (M8) that was not either within 10 seconds of GMP (6 of the miles) or faster than GMP (4 of the miles).

How slow should the easy pace be? Generally, it's about 1-2 minutes slower than one's goal race pace. For the 2012 WMP, I was in the 10-10:30 group. For the Wineglass Marathon, my pace for most of the training long runs was between 10:00 and 11:00. And, as I found out the hard way, that wasn't fast enough! Or, more accurately, it wasn't that the pace didn't adequately prepare me, but rather the level of fitness of which that pace was a metric was not high enough for me to have run Wineglass at my GMP. In Jeff Gaudette's article on the pace of easy long runs, he recommends an optimal easy long run pace of 55-75% of one's 5K pace. For my 5K PR pace of 7:23, that works out to be between 9:14 and 10:42. That 5K PR was run in the spring of 2013, and Wineglass was in the fall of that year. The obvious conclusion at Wineglass was that I wasn't ready, but now I better understand why. My training long run pace was at the slow end of the range of pace--and the low end of the level of fitness--as indicated by my 5K PR. In the 15 months since Wineglass, my easy training pace has improved to the fast end of the recommended range of pace, and beyond!

As a metric for running progress, my easy training pace shows an increase in the level of fitness of about 1:20 (from an average of 10:30 to 9:10) and perhaps presages a realistic shot at BQ in May!