Marathon – 5 weeks out

The last time I updated you on my marathon journey, the weekly volume started to climb, and I finally started to become quicker.

Week 12

Week 12 then was meant as a deload week to recovery from accumulated fatigue. I somehow ended up ditching the long run–the most important run of the week. I don’t even remember why, probably just because of poor planning.

Week 13

This week, I again showed up to only 4 out of 5 runs. Because of the marathon pace interval run and the long becoming actually a bit longer, I still ended up running about 60 km, which is not too bad of a volume.

I really started disliking the marathon pace interval run.

You are supposed to switch between running in zone 2 (~ 155 bpm heart rate) and zone 3 (~ 163 bpm) which feels more difficult than just keeping the higher tempo. It takes a good amount of concentration and running extra slow to get your heart rate down fast enough for the short zone 2 interval after running in zone 3.

Week 14

In week 14 everything was smooth. I ran 71 km, which is the highest weekly mileage I hit so far. However, running two runs about the size of a half-marathon in a week, with limited time to recover in between, left me fatigued.

I also started to incorporate strides, which are 100 m “sprints” at about 90% of your max effort. I do them at the end of shorter runs.

The idea with strides is that it’s naturally harder to run really fast with bad running form. By running fast and concentrated for short sprints, you are supposed to improve your running form.

I do feel that they actually help me a lot.

Week 15

During the Monday run, I already felt substantially fatigued from last week. This didn’t get better during the week.

I also had slight troubles with the muscles around my chins since last week. I guess by now I became better at running fatigued and with injuries. I managed to complete the runs.

I believe this is about as high as the weekly kilometres go up for this plan. I now have reached around the peak of volume.

Learnings

In the weeks leading up to this, I tried to make my runs optimal. Optimal eating before, optimal efforts during, and optimal recovery in between runs.

To fit all those kilometres into my schedule, I had to become a lot more pragmatic. I ran injured and exhausted. On a full stomach, then empty. In 30 °C heat and through lashing rain. Not aiming for an optimal performance, but at getting things done.

This helped me to become a more composed runner.

Progress

I also became faster. Last update I gave was about a 5:40 pace in zone 3 (~ 163 bpm heart rate). On shorter runs and on a good day, I now manage to run a 5:30 pace in zone 2 (~ 155 bpm).

My Vo2Max also rose from 53 last update to 55 now.

It’s still too early to make race predictions. But I am slowly getting hyped about running the actual marathon.

I’ll keep you updated.

Until next Sunday!

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