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 opinion, recent innovations have only gilded the lily.
When heart rate monitors showed up, they automated what my athletes had been doing for years by using their fingers to count heart beats at their wrist or neck. GPS monitors showed up as a surprise, as I never anticipated having an instrument that could calculate pace automatically. Thus, I was amazed when one of my athletes told me his secret to pacing the marathon without a crashing slowdown. He followed a written, mile-by-mile pacing plan, sticking to it for the entire race, using a GPS monitor.
Thunderstruck, I realized immediately that the sport of long-distance running had been revolutionized. Suddenly, beginners could finish a well-paced marathon without having to gain wisdom the hard way: by crashing multiple times in the marathon. Suddenly, also, a coach could easily obtain an accurate measure of a group’s pace during their workouts. Since all my group leaders soon had GPS monitors, I immediately conceived of studies that would give me valid answers to questions I’d had for years.
I wanted to know, for instance, how training pace compares with race pace. One of my first studies compared nine ability groups (104 athletes) during their training for the 2010 Honolulu Marathon. The group leaders measured their group’s average pace during eleven Monday-evening, 90-minute workouts. Then I compared each group’s training pace with their average marathon pace. What do you think? Was their training pace faster, slower, or the same as their marathon pace?
“Knowing my penchant for training slowly, most of my current athletes think the groups trained slower than their marathon pace. In fact, they trained almost exactly as fast as they raced.”
Knowing my penchant for training slowly, most of my current athletes think the groups trained slower than their marathon pace. In fact, they trained almost exactly as fast as they raced. In other words, since we were training for the marathon racing distance, our long-slow, Monday evening chit-chat runs had a dual ability-building purpose: we were not only building stamina—the ability to run long-and-slow—but also the tempo ability to do the marathon at the same long-slow, chit-chat pace.
If my athletes had been training for 10K instead of 42K, the same Monday evening run would have been slower than race pace, and not a worthy 10K tempo training stimulus. In fact, all nine groups in the first study experienced their 42K race pace as slow, relaxed, and conversational for at least the first half of the marathon.
Similarly, though training pace ranged from 8.9 (for the fastest group) to 14.6 minutes per mile, all 104 athletes experienced their exertion as being slow, “held-back,” and conversational. Our GPS monitors had given us insight into the close relationship between our long-slow-distance training pace and our marathon race pace. In the process I confirmed the efficacy of stamina training for the marathon racing distance.