After Fargo, I was trying to figure out why I crashed. Albeit I was able to go a little farther than my last marathon go at Twin Cities from mile 18 to mile 22, but what was frustrating was through all of the training going into Fargo with all that mileage, I was noticeably slowing down at mile 17 and finally had to stop and WALK at mile 22 and then the death march.
I don't want to do that again. I had to sit down and figure things out. I mentioned how I was following Rubbish Runner's (RR) blog and going through his sub-3 hour marathon and we had a pretty good back and forth email conversation about the plan. RR outlined how the plan was based on Arthur Lydiard's training principals. So I dug into Lydiard's history and discovered how he trained 1960 Olympic Champions (Peter Snell, Murray Halberg) and I was fascinated with the story and the history of that era. So I dug up all of the reading material I could find on Lydiard and he actually has a lot of his training principles available floating around the internet.
The only problem with all of that information, it was hard to sift through the noise and putting it all together to make sense within my capabilities. Lydiard was famous for his 100 mile (161km) week programs. And thinking to myself, how the hell? There are a lot of books out there with Lydiard's training principals written by Lydiard himself that can be found on Amazon. I couldn't find anything at my local library so as I was sifting through the Amazon catalog, I came upon Healthy Intelligent Training (HIT) by Arthur Livingstone and going by the reviews and finding out more from Letsrun.com forum boards, that book seemed to be one of the better written and concise resources based on Lydiard's principals. The author knew Lydiard and was coached by Barry Magee, who was a contemporary to Lydiard's original athletes (Snell and Halberg).
I picked up the book and read through it, pouring over all of the information along with the sub 3 hr plan and putting together my own plan. I consider myself a beginner and I've written out the plan so I'm tackling the distances in a slow and manageable progression. I've signed up for the Twin Cities marathon and with the way my plan is laid out, I'll have a 7 week base build, 4 weeks of transition (Hill training), 5 weeks of Peak conditioning (track work) and 3 week taper before the race. And with my Fargo marathon training over the past 4 months, I have the fitness carried over well into my base building phase.
And that is where my major focus is on right now...the base building phase. I believe it was a lack of aerobic development that was my downfall. I don't think I had enough of a base to be able to carry myself 26 miles as was proven when I literally died at mile 22 but was considerably slowing down at mile 17.
And so it began 2 weeks ago, running everyday, at an easy pace of ( 60 - 70% of Heart Rate Reserve (HRR) - 135 - 149bpm) and a couple of days of aerobic ( 70 - 80% HRR - 149 - 162bpm) with my long run at the end of the week. In the book HIT, Livingstone wrote:
The purpose of this phase was to systematically build the aerobic capacity to the highest level possible before commencing faster work. The biggest stimulus to the development of aerobic capacity is often uninterrupted time spent at higher aerobic or sub-threshold levels: especially with regard to the development of the very fine blood vessels in the running muscles.
All of my current mileage has been building up systematically and I want to get it to the point where I'm running 2 hrs at an even effort. I'm currently not worried about pacing as I don't want to find myself straining to reach a certain pace as more a consistent effort. What I found the best about Lydiard's philosophy was, Train, Don't Strain. It's still too early in the training cycle to draw any conclusions but I've been running every day and I'm able to continue with good recovery after my week ending LSD's and those higher aerobic zone runs.
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