Marathon Post #14

_{a Selfie today after I passed the 14km mark at the entrance to our village}

a Special Week!

This was a special week, off course I had my 4 runs to do as normal. The one thing in my runs that was abnormal was the fact that I would have an obligatory 16 kilometer run. Off course it is normal that the distances increase as I'm training for a marathon, but 16 kilometers is half of my normal distance, so quite a milestone. Over the past period since I started training I now managed to increase my 'normal' distance by half. So a moment to stand still by, but not too long as I still have a marathon to train for. Next week the long run already has to be 19 kilometers.

Another highlight was the Ochsner Sport Running Team evening about which I wrote on Friday. It was really cool to refresh my memory with the stuff I learnt in September and to also meet a running legend, Viktor Röthlin. The stuff that I learnt I managed to use straight away and it worked! Yes, I already knew some of that stuff, but to get the refresher and then applying it properly and seeing the results really gave a cool and satisfying feeling.

All-in-all a great running week to look back on.

_{Then there was this moment that I 'ran-in' on these 3 snales ...}

Here is a little run-down of each of my runs since my last running post:

Wednesday 16.5. - Pfäffikon 🇨🇭

• Weather: 12 degrees, windy and lucky to miss the rains
• Distance: 5,01 km
• Time: 24:31 mins
• Pace: 4:53 min/km
• Avg Cadence: 166 spm
• Training Effect: 3,7
• Company: Alone
• Goal: First day of 3 in a row to get used to running on tired legs

Recap

My colleague had injured himself slightly over the weekend, so he wanted to take another day rest. As I was on my own today I decided to work a bit on cadence. My max cadence was 183 spm, so I know there’s room for improvement, but I felt a bit tired so I’m happy with the overall result.

Thursday 17.5. - Pfäffikon 🇨🇭

• Weather: 12 degrees, windy and again lucky to miss the rains
• Distance: 10,1 km
• Time: 54:39 mins
• Pace: 5:25 min/km
• Avg Cadence: 159 spm
• Training Effect: 4,4
• Company: with my colleague and marathon partner
• Goal: Second day of 3 in a row and adding distance to increase the tiredness effect

Recap

My colleague was back today with me and he wanted to take it easy, however he didn’t notice that I kept increasing the pace slightly. In the end he felt good about the whole thing and fit enough to join me the next day. As the course itself is pretty boring we have to find ways to ensure we achieve the set kilometers, for the time being we settled on doing a few extra rounds around the school building of the HSR (Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil).

It was a good run and we kept a good pace throughout. If we can keep the 5:25 pace on the marathon day throughout, we’ll finish it the marathon in 3 hours 53 minutes, which would be a dream off course!

During the run my max cadence was 220 spm, so a good run overall and we still managed to talk throughout the run.

Friday 18.5. - Pfäffikon 🇨🇭

• Weather: 15 degrees and sunny
• Distance: 5,01 km
• Time: 26:13 mins
• Pace: 5:14 min/km
• Avg Cadence: 160 spm
• Training Effect:
• Company: with my colleague and marathon partner
• Goal: Third day of 3 in a row and running on tired legs

Recap

The third run in as many days and now we really have tired legs. We took it more easy today and I informed my running partner about the course from the night before. An important lesson I took from the course was that when you get tired you should really try to focus on more steps per minute. That way you avoid injuring yourself and you can actually run faster that way.

Viktor Röthlin recapped that during his marathon in Barcelona where he became European Champion, he ran away at the 28^th kilometre. This was part 3/3 and he was tired so he upped his cadence and he expected that they would catch up with him, but they never did. The rest is history!

I told my colleague about this and also reiterated that I’d been working on it slightly already, but we should put a bit more work on this in our next runs, so that we can last the distance and have a strategy for when we get tired.

A good run considering that I was tired from the evening before and faster than we expected, but also because I worked on my cadence again at some points. My max cadence during this run was 183 spm.

Sunday 20.5. - Oberwil 🇨🇭

• Weather: 12 degrees, windy but clear, however clouds approaching
• Distance: 16,44 km
• Time: 1:28:52 mins
• Pace: 5:24 min/km
• Avg Cadence: 166 spm
• Training Effect: 4,7
• Company: the first 5 km with my upstairs neighboor
• Goal: distance, distance, distance

Recap

”This run was harder than usual”, is what I was thinking to myself when I was approaching the 12 kilometer mark. I was even thinking to myself, "why am I feeling like this". I felt alright, although I knew it would be more difficult today, I took my time and even made some regular smaller breaks, I concluded that it must've just the fact of the 'long' distance and something I had to get used to in my head. So I quickly parked that thought and focussed on the job on hand ... another 4 kilometers to go.

I am really happy with the result, I achieved an average pace of 5:24 mins/km which if I can maintain that over a 42 kilometer distance would mean that I would finish the marathon under 4 hours ... that would be fantastic! In the later kilometers I focussed on increasing my cadence as I had learnt from Viktor Röthlin on Thursday and indeed I even managed to do kilometer #15 in 4:44. I even achieved the fantastic max cadence today of 239.

Here are my best long runs in comparison with one another:

Conclusion

Below is the schedule that I'm aiming to stick to:

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