Missed yesterday's post due to yet another packed day. Straight to work upon waking so I could get out of there in time to meet with my adviser at 3PM. Then my Data Mining class at 4. Followed that with a short track workout (4x800m@3:00 plus a warm up and warm down). Then, straight to choir practice (I've pretty much quit choir, but a long-time associate pastor of our church passed away last week and I felt joining them for his funeral this Saturday was a fairly high calling). Finally, a short bit of research and off to bed. So, I'll enter a somewhat off-topic post this morning and may have some academic meat later on today.
It's only somewhat off topic because, as I've mentioned before, the big casualty in all this has been my running. That's a good thing, really. Something had to give and better my running performances than something that really mattered. That said, running matters to me.
I'll begin by acknowledging that there is absolutely no reason why somebody needs to be their absolute best at anything, much less a recreational pursuit. However, if one is trying to do something well, looking for shortcuts is not the way to go. My impending performance at The Woodlands serves as a illustrative case. Accepting the elite invite to The Woodlands Marathon last fall seemed like a good idea at the time. I was coming off a sub-3 and age group win at Milwaukee. With winter break providing six weeks of decent training time, it seemed like I could hold some decent form together.
We'll find out in 8 days just how far we need to stretch the definition of "decent form" to make that statement true but, for the purposes of argument, let's assume that all my pre-race predictors are right and I run somewhere around 3:03.
Taken in isolation, Runner's World would use that as a case study for their typical "Here's a super busy guy who does great on less training" story. Only 12 weeks of prep totaling barely 800 miles, but those two quality workouts per week had him beating his Boston Qualifying time by half an hour. They might even go further to suggest that I could qualify for Boston on even less if I just turned up the intense workouts a bit more.
Ah, but that's the rub. I probably could. But not because 40 miles a week and some track work is enough. It's because I have this huge base from when I had time to train right. My best marathons have been preceded by around 1700 miles in 18 weeks. The only reason I'll still be way under the BQ standard is that fitness doesn't leave you overnight (it just feels that way). I know, as does just about every credible coach, that running marathons well means running twice a day every day for years.
While it'a a surprising fact of biology that one can get reasonably close to optimal performance on much less, the running press has interpreted this as meaning that the extra effort doesn't really pay off. Nothing could be further from the truth. Five minutes may not sound like much, but the winning time for 50+ at nearly every mid-sized city marathon is between 2:55 and 3:00. That five minutes has demoted me from someone who had a legitimate shot of winning my age at 90% of the world's marathons to someone who doesn't have a chance. It's not coincidental that the winning times are so uniform. It's a diminishing returns game which compresses the results into a very small range. Those tight times are indicative that the top runners are engaged in some pretty serious marathon prep. You either do it or you lose to someone who did.
Again, I'm not super depressed about this. I knew that grad school would be the end of my competitive athletics. I'm merely making a point that so many people seem to miss. There simply are no shortcuts. If you want to be good at something, do so. But count the cost, because it is high.
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