Successful marathoning requires that you master slow-paced training. Whether your goal is to finish and enjoy a marathon or compete and perform in it, you must pace yourself, so you establish an injury-free regime that builds racing ability.
Running at a slow, light exertion pace builds stamina—the base ability. Stamina gives you the ability to run long-and-slow. In our program, a long workout is 1.5 to 2.5 hours in duration. But even shorter runs can build stamina when they are done slowly. If you train faster than your slow pace during long-duration workouts, you won’t be able to sustain your training effort without undue fatigue.
The energy you spend on program workouts is limited. So, you must spend it wisely. The most common training pitfall is to think you’ll build more ability sooner by going faster than a slow pace. Our various sorts of workouts are all designed with a specific ability-building purpose, whether to build stamina, power, tempo, speed, or endurance. Each ability is built with a specific structuring of exertion, e.g., long-and-slow for stamina. BC Endurance coaches teach our athletes how to do our workouts, but the athletes must carry on with wisdom and understanding to avoid training pitfalls.
Another common pitfall is confusing a slow pace with being slow. Obviously, some athletes are faster than others, but our admonition isn’t about talent. It’s about running at light exertion, instead of, say, steady state. When everyone trains at their individual slow pace, the more talented athletes move ahead on the course. You must accept your ability as a starting point. In BC Endurance programs we start by gradually increasing duration at a slow pace. Done correctly, duration increases as your stamina improves. But your stamina training pace should always feel light.
“When everyone trains at their individual slow pace, the more talented athletes move ahead on the course. You must accept your ability as a starting point.”
A light exertion pace is a chit-chat pace. Your breathing is normal and conversational, and the effort is unconscious. Through the mid-point of most long runs, you’ll have to hold yourself back on this exertion scale: gentle, held-back, relaxed, pressed, forced, strained. If you go one or two minutes per mile faster than your slow pace, you’ll no longer be holding back, but running quick-and-relaxed, instead. At that steady-state level, there is a noticeable, mid-sentence huff in your breathing, and you’ll have to concentrate to sustain the pace before fatigue forces you to slow down.
Any workout run at a slow pace builds stamina—even the short-slow taper and recovery runs we do before and after races. Similarly, off-day workouts augment your base of time on the road. Many of the best marathoners run twice a day, building a huge capacity for exertion in the process. It’s that capacity that enables them to run faster than they otherwise would. But here’s the caveat: the total weekly regimen cannot be exhaustive, nor injurious.
It’s easy to become frustrated with a slow pace. There’s nothing dramatic about it. My back-in-the-day acquaintance, Frank Shorter, who won the 1972 Olympic marathon used to say his grandmother could run with him on his easy days, but few people in the world could run with him for a week.
Frank Shorter At The 1972 Summer Olympics, a photograph by John Dominis available from Fine Art America.