The beginner: Carol Williamson
I have just done my first fartlek session in Victoria Park, east London, and it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. For the uninitiated (like myself), this is apparently a form of cross training which should improve my fitness. We started off with a gentle 10-minute warm-up; spent the next 35 minutes running for between 30 seconds and three minutes at different speeds ranging from sprints to marathon pace; and finished up with a 10-minute cool-down run.
I was aching a little the next day, which shows how little sprinting I have been doing up to now. Hopefully, doing some more of these sessions will lead to an improvement in my speed and/or my anaerobic threshold, which will in turn aid performance on the big day.
The session was certainly challenging, but Sam Murphy is endlessly encouraging. As she got the coffees in at the Pavilion Café afterwards, she insisted that I am doing well and have ‘potential’ – not letting the fact that she was talking to a dripping, puce-in-the-face, obvious non-athlete put her off. She was not even glowing, by the way. I suspect she counted our session as a gentle warm-up before her own workout, but was too kind to say so.
We discussed the surprising lack of female-only running clubs in London. When I first started running I didn’t have the confidence to join a mixed club, as I was so worried I would be seriously off the pace. An all-female environment might have been less intimidating. It would be interesting to know if you’re a member of a running club, and what you get out of it?
Sam mooted the possibility of a joint session with Matt before race day, but in light of his bionic fitness compared to my own I have managed to downgrade this to separate training sessions with a coffee in the middle for us to meet. It would be nice to see a friendly face on the start line! Apparently we have got on to the green start, so I am keen to see such diverse luminaries as Jordan and Gordon Ramsay lining up nearby.
Received wisdom seems to be that the most important element in marathon training is the long run. I hope to reach a maximum of 20 miles before race day and then taper off in the final three weeks. This seems a scarily long distance, but nonetheless I am planning to run 18 miles this Sunday (having spectacularly failed to do same in Central Park last weekend due to cocktail overload the night before). I have roped in a friend to run the last seven miles with me, am well stocked-up with gels, Saturday night invites have been refused, and a night of sobriety and a big bowl of pasta beckons …
Progress report by running expert Sam Murphy
Carol only found out that she was running the London marathon in January. That’s fine for someone with lots of years in their legs, but for a first-timer with only a few months’ running experience it cuts the training period somewhat short and doesn’t give much leeway for lapses of motivation and/or discipline! To make matters worse, when I first met with Carol in early February she was struggling to follow a punishing regime torn out of a running magazine, amounting to 50-odd miles a week.
I think some of Carol’s dread about the marathon was vanquished when I put my red pen through half the sessions on her schedule and advised her to run her long runs at a slower pace. The key objectives we agreed on, given the limited time span, were to progressively increase the distance of her long runs and to introduce some faster-paced work. She has done brilliantly with the faster-paced work (I suspect Carol gets bored pretty easily), performing a weekly threshold session and now adding fartlek to her running repertoire. The long runs have progressed too, although it is these, Carol confesses, that she ‘endures’ rather than enjoys.
Having said that, she completed a half-marathon comfortably a few weeks ago (her last three miles were her fastest, which is a great way to be finishing a training race) and has since polished off a 15-miler. But like many first-timers, Carol sometimes struggles to prioritise running. For example, last weekend’s long run was sacrificed at the altar of cocktails and shopping in New York, leaving her just two more opportunities for long runs before the taper period begins.
One of the perils of marathon training is that it lasts such a long time. It can be hard to keep your eye on the ball for such a prolonged period and there’s always the temptation to think, ‘Oh well, I’ll do it next weekend …’ But laying a solid foundation of long runs over a period of weeks is absolutely crucial to race day success, and you can’t skimp on them or expect to cram them all in at the last minute.
I don’t have any doubt that Carol will make it to the finish line on 26 April. Nor do I have any doubt that she will enjoy the journey. But I do suspect that with a little more training, she would have been capable of getting there quicker.
The improver: Matt Kurton
Ah, Primrose Hill: London’s own city retreat. Inspirer of artists. Deliverer of views. Soother of weary minds. And, last Tuesday afternoon, the location for my second meeting with Sam, which involved a lot of legging it up and downhill, counting lampposts.
To give it it’s proper name, it was a pyramid hill session. Satisfyingly brutal, it involved starting at the bottom of the hill, running at a ‘comfortably uncomfortable’ pace to the first lamppost, turning round and coming back to the start, turning around again and running to the second lamppost, then back again, and so on – until we were running to the ninth lamppost, most of the way up the hill.
The whole thing took just over 10 minutes. Then we did it again. Except this time starting at the top, running down to the first lamppost, then back up again, and so on. By this stage, the bloke sitting on a bench at the bottom of the hill had stopped pretending not to watch and was chuckling to himself every time I ran by. Sam and I were sprinting along at different paces, so every so often she’d run towards me shouting something like, “Three to go! Keep it up!”
This is more like it, I thought to myself between gasps. This is what having a personal trainer should be like. This is a Rocky theme tune moment.
It’s an ideal workout if you’re looking to mix up your speedwork, and broadly similar to the Kenyan hills session I’ve started doing since my first meeting with Sam. That’s also an interval session, but involves running up and down a gentle hill continuously for five minutes, relaxing for 60 seconds or so, then repeating three or four times. Like the pyramid session, it’s a good way to get fitter and faster, and also to help your body use oxygen more efficiently and deal with lactic acid more effectively. It’s also handy because it doesn’t take too long, so you can squeeze it into a lunch hour or do it before work.
The same isn’t true for the long runs, which must be taking over the weekends of plenty of people reading this as the marathon fast approaches, and which Sam also has some good ideas about. I’ve always just gone out and run a given distance as close as possible to the time I’m hoping to run on the day. Bad move, says Sam, because you risk putting yourself off and getting injured. Better to just run a section of some of your long runs at marathon pace, and to rely on speedwork to make sure you have enough in your legs on the big day.
So I headed out in the Saturday sun and ran ten miles slower than I’m hoping to go (though admittedly not as slowly as Sam had suggested – I’m still finding it tough not to speed up), before upping the pace to 8-minute miles for the next ten. It veered between the very pleasant and the are-we-nearly-there-yet?, but it could have been much worse. With my first 20-mile run in the bag, the fact that I’m running London suddenly became much more real.
If you’re training for London (or Paris, Boston, Madrid or any of the other spring marathons), I really hope it’s going well – and I’d be very interested to hear how you’re getting on as the long runs become a reality. One month to go …
Progress report by Sam Murphy
Running 26.2 miles is a marathon task, and not one that should be undertaken lightly. Matt learned this firsthand when he did his debut marathon three years ago (when, he admits, he made every mistake in the book), leaving him hungry for information and advice on how to do better. His impressive improvement in two subsequent marathons demonstrates that he has taken a lot of lessons on board along the way. And as he’s become increasingly enamoured of running, he is eager to absorb as much running knowledge as possible. I half expect him to turn up to our sessions with a notebook and pen.
His commitment and focus are exemplary – in fact, my main challenge with Matt has been to stop him overdoing things, particularly given that he began marathon training with an ongoing niggle in his adductor (inner thigh muscle). Many a runner, Matt included, has a touch of the ‘if some is good, more must be better’ philosophy when it comes to mileage, pace and overall volume of training, but it’s not a theory that holds water.
For example, Olympic marathoner Liz Yelling, who can run a sub-2.30 marathon, performs her ‘recovery’ runs at 8-minute mile pace. Even Paula Radcliffe only does three tough sessions per week – the rest are devoted to steady or easy running. By running easier some of the time, Matt has been able to put more effort into the tougher sessions, like threshold training and hill work, and introduce a fourth run into his training week that his former ‘eyeballs out’ regime left him too knackered to manage!
So far, we’ve kept the injury at bay through careful monitoring, stretching, icing and sports massage. But when it did flare up, after the Milton Keynes half-marathon, Matt found it difficult to take time off to let it settle. His frustration put me in mind of a dog straining to be let off its leash! Rest means rest, I told him – not trying it out every five minutes to see if it’s better yet. His patience paid off and he’s right on schedule, with a good number of long, steady runs under his belt, including a 20-miler in which he performed the second 10 miles faster than the first.
If Matt continues to progress at this rate, I think London will yield another personal best for him. All being well (because anything can happen on the day, no matter how well you’ve prepared) I believe he is capable of achieving his goal of running sub-3.30.
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