The 21-day rotating marathon training block

An article about a reality show that started as a blog post

Since it’s probably appropriate to include running-related content here along with rants about miscreant ex-runners and guest posts by genial dogs, this post is a dive into an article posted last week to Podium Runner. These 1,200 or so words form the foundation of most of the training plans I concoct, even if I no longer stick to the ones I design for myself. (Although I’ve slowed down my production of for-immediate-profit word-heaps lately, I might be choosing better topics, as Letsrun.com has linked to my two most recent PR articles. I have other, more entertaining suspicions for this modest spate of endorsements, but keep in mind my brain contains few neurons unscathed by unrelenting drug abuse, mostly huffing, even if that still leaves me more cogent and better attuned to reality than almost everyone alive.)

In a sense, I wrote this article over a period of about two decades. At some point in my late twenties, I decided that I was going to pursue getting faster at long-distance running by sticking to some kind of well-defined but flexible plan that incorporated as much basic wisdom as possible from trusted sources (mainly Pete Pfitzinger and Gordon Bakoulis) without violating any critical-appearing “rules.” The result is the idea of a basic three-week building block, itself not a new concept but as yet not a very popular one. I worked some of this into an article for Triathlete some years back, but didn’t expand on it the way I have here.

This is one of a number of pieces I’ve had published over the years that spent their infancy and toddlerhood as blog posts before maturing into presentations I thought might appeal to a bona fide running audience and not just a bunch of easily amused graybeards. I’m noting this because I used to think it this was common practice among writers with blogs, but it turns out it’s not; most of the people whose names you’ve seen in running magazines* for a minute or two seem prone to pitching ideas they believe are worth widely propagating before spending time developing them, rather than “discovering” the apparent value of their ideas in the course of writing about them from scratch. This information is probably not useful to you, but if you’re a blogger who wonders if your stuff might command a few dollars, especially during an economic downturn and a time you may not feel like doing fuck-all, you should investigate the possibility, given how rife with bad-faith entrepreneurs the niche has become.

Anyway, a word no one should begin a paragraph with, by the time I was “officially” training for the 2001 Boston Marathon, which I didn’t know I would be running until three months before the race, I was a believer in centering my training around marathon-pace runs and tempo runs, which aren’t vastly different in practice when you’re relatively fast. At the time, the prevailing wisdom among “relatively fast” marathon runners — i.e., other Olympic Trials aspirants as well as most I knew who were inside qualifying the window — was that balancing 20-mile long runs at unspecified paces with fast track workouts and plenty of mileage was the best way to get ready. Who wants to run multiple 90-minute to two-hour runs at marathon pace when that keeps you from racing one of countless local 5Ks that weekend and wrecks the first half of the next week, too?

In my most recent 26.2-miler, the 1999 Baystate Marathon about fifteen months earlier, I had set a four-minute PR with a 2:26:52, and three weeks before that had run 30K on the track, most of it with a dog unrelated to my current one, within a second or so of that pace (5:36 per mile). In October of 2000, I had run a PR of 1:08:29 on the first half of the same two-loop course in Massachusetts where I’d run the 2:26, and had stayed reasonably fit into midwinter. I was coaching and teaching in 2000-2001, which meant that I might as well have been living among bat-eating wet-market merchants in terms of the number of exposures to huge clouds of respiratory viruses I experienced, and I for the first time in my life I was rarely without a head cold during the bleaker months. Otherwise, I was ready to pile on the mileage and run some longer races in February and March to prepare for Boston.

Without knowing it, though, I had already added an element to my training that probably put the last necessary touches on that winter 2001 training block. In (I believe) 1998, Boston University began hosting all-comers indoor meets on four or five Saturdays in December and January. At the time, the only events were the 3,000 meters and the mile. $5 not only got you into one of these events, but allowed you to run as many heats of it if you wanted; $10 earned you a number good for every race held that morning, which could be three or four heats of the 3,000 and six or seven of the mile by the end of the series.

If you’ve ever visited south-central New Hampshire in January, you may have gotten the sense that finding places to safely run under five-minute place outdoors is more challenging than it is in, say, Brazil, or even the part Connecticut that’s actually a borough of New York City. So, by traveling to several of those meets and running multiple events at anywhere from 4:30 to 4:50 pace or so, I was getting in a small but critical amount of hard work at a pace that makes 5:30s feel downright easy, at least for a while and if you have the mileage to back it up. None of this is rocket science, but again, in this case I stumbled into it thanks mostly to constraints beyond my control.

You can see by looking closely at that training block that it doesn’t map precisely onto the schedule in the Podium Runner article. But in looking at the training blocks I have performed and prescribed that have seemed to produce the most success, this seems to hit closest to the middle.

As a general note, it’s important to understand that you only have to get about 80 percent of this kind of schedule or scheme “right” to be as ready for your race as the author anticipates, provided that what you omit is replaced by appropriate workout substitutes. When you’re usually asked to do at least three particular workouts a week on specified days, the chances of you doing this to the letter week in and week our are practically zero, even if you get perfect weather. When Pete was providing me plans much like the type discussed in the article, I was doing up to 135 miles a week during the winter, and between unpredictable weather and just not being able to do some of the workouts owing to garden-variety fatigue, I did a decent amount of tinkering and juggling. During that period, I got into better marathon shape than ever before.

More broadly, as long as you understand what you’re actually trying to accomplish with a particular distribution of training paces beyond the numerical niceties of each session, you’ll be okay.

This is perhaps only tangentially related, but most of the time I’ve seen a plan like this fail, it wasn’t because someone has followed it closely but didn’t get fit enough to reach the desired goal. It’s because schedules like these are usually coupled to high-mileage plans that demand two-a-days, and these seem to have fallen into disfavor in the “almost good” category of marathon runner. While I correctly characterize both my present and much of my past life as that of a marginally productive layabout, during both of the periods I was running my best — in the first halves of 2001 and 2004 — I was working anywhere from 40 to 50 hours a week at jobs that demanded some level of travel, preparation and on-site performance. I sometimes did second runs at 9 p.m. or sneaked them in during breaks between classes or other obligations. When I moved to Boulder, I was well past my competitive days, but I expected to see loads of people putting in work at strange hours on the trails and tracks, given that getting faster at running is ostensibly why they uprooted themselves to be here in the first place. I know it’s not this way everywhere, but in this alleged running mecca of Boulder, by the time the sun sets, more of the club-runner types who might not have been seen beating feet that day seem to be in the brew pubs.

But this is all dovetailing into more sputtering about the gravity-assist gang, so I’ll end the post, if not the day, on a precariously positive note. It’s snowing like hell and not expected to get above freezing until mid-day Tuesday, and Rosie, whose ancestors were allegedly wolves, doesn’t like this weather with its gelid dandruff just yet. And come to think of it, I have little motivation to wobble around for my own “obligatory” hour in this shit. This means I should probably work myself into a lather writing about the legions of area safety hypocrites, but I will probably just stare at fake stories on a screen for a while, after I do that run. Dammit.