Week Seven: Pace Race

We are smack dab in the middle of marathon training season. This week, we cross over from hills and strength work to pace work. If you need help arriving at a marathon pace, I would suggest you consult ALL THREE of the following:

1. One of your coaches.
2. Your team leader.
3. The person/people whom you are doing your long runs with.

Each person will have unique insight either about you as an individual or have marathon experience that can help.

Or for all you do-it-yourselfers, the interwebs has some pace calculators and conversion charts. Click here for the most dangerous tool on the interwebs: the Race Results Predictor. I hesitate to pass this website onto you. So I pass it on to you with one major disclaimer.

DISCLAIMER: The race predictor calculator uses mathematical formulas. It cannot take into account where your individual strengths and weaknesses are. I will use myself as an example. I am a much better at running the 1500m or the 5k, than I am at a martathon. So if you punch my 5k time from last spring into the race predictor calculator, it predicts a marathon time that was 16 minutes faster than what I actually ran at Grandma's. I put in my Half-Marathon time in from April, and it predicited a time that was still ten minutes too fast, compared to how I did at Grandma's.

Also, the predictor cannot take into account what the weather will be like on race day.

So if you play around with the race calculator, please take the results with a grain of salt. Consider your strengths and weaknesses. If you are like me, and really skewed toward one distance, it can mislead you into thinking you can should a faster or slower pace than necesarry.

But the nice thing about using race predictor calculator is it can give you a start at finding the marathon pace that is right for you. It is one more tool for you to use, but by no means is it an exact science.

And that is after all why we run the race right? If everything was guaranteed, we could all just go run a 5k, punch our time into a the calculator, and stop training since the calculator already told us what was going to happen. We could just say that was our marathon. I personally like challenge of facing the unkown. And that's why I keep coming back to this distance again and again. No other distance I've raced compares to it, in terms of the stakes and the unpredictability.