Bryan's Running Blog

Bryan,

I'm impressed with your consistent strong pace. That pace that you run is pretty close to where you need to be to make it to Boston. Of course, at some point you'll need to increase your mileage a bit. I've always been amazed at your natural ability. I had been running for years our freshman year and you ran for a couple of weeks and held with me with almost no trouble at all.

Do you have access to a fitness center or gym during the day at work? Can you break away for a bit around lunch to put in some miles? Perhaps that is when you are running right now. Are you a professor yet or do you still have some schooling to go? If so, do they work you to death initially until you reach tenure. How does that work?

Anyway, I'll stop blabbing.

I guess to break 3:10 in a marathon we'll have to run about 7 minute miles. So a 5 mile closer to 35 minutes would be minimum race pace (I was off a bit) but you seem to be pretty comfortable running 7:30 miles.

Yes, 7:30 is pretty easy for me as long as I'm only running 5-8 miles. I'll obviously need to pick up my speed and distance eventually. Sasha talks like it's best to work on distance first. He's probably right. Before joining this blog though, I'd kind of had the other approach -- I'll get speed first and then work on distance. I'm still going for speed because I want to break my 5 minute mile. But I've been gradually running a little farther lately also.

Training to run a quick mile, we hardly ever ran more than 5-6 miles in training (high school). We did tons of speed work and good hard 5-6 mile runs. It worked fine.

Sasha's right about marathon running. You typically first build a base and then as you approach race time you start to incorporate hills and other challeges. Eventually, you do a period of speedwork but not until after your endurance is very high. Of course, that was just one opinion that I read about.