BC ENDURANCE BLOG

I started training marathoners in 1979 at the height of the running boom. I had run the mile under nationally famous Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon so I was arrogant enough to think I could train long distance runners. I was recently “retired” from seven...

In 2009, 124 athletes from my BC Endurance marathon training finished the Honolulu Marathon. Of that number, 48% were slowing or crashing in the final seg-ment—from 30K to 42K. It was a hot year, but that wasn’t why they slowed or crashed. “Slowing” and “crashing” are...

This is the last of three articles introducing an in-depth series on the topic of pacing marathons. This article continues a description of my coaching background, starting in 1979 as a rookie professional coach and marathon program director. In the early years, most...

In the second article in this series on pacing the marathon, I described the Honolulu Marathon Clinic as being my main programmatic competition in the early 1980s when I first started training athletes for the Honolulu Marathon. Thirty years later, the Clinic, under...

There have been several technological breakthroughs during my coaching career. The first was the heart rate monitor, which gave an accurate and objective measure of exertion. The second was the GPS monitor, which gave an accurate measure of pace in real time. In my...

Previous articles in this series describe the best way to pace a marathon without a crashing slowdown. Certain principles stand out: do the first 10K at least three percent slower than a realistic goal pace. And do not be faster than one percent of that pace through...

2013 was a pivotal year in my quest to get BC Endurance athletes through the marathon without crashing. By 2013, I knew how to develop a mile-by-mile pacing plan, but the goal that still eluded me was to accurately estimate an athlete’s ability pace.For a mile-by-mile...