So, I Just Ran My Butt Off In The Stupid Time Trial. What Now?

The half marathoners and Upstarts (and a few visiting marathoners) set a good precedent yesterday at the track. I was really proud of and excited about the effort I saw out there. Like I said before, as important as it is to get that baseline for your training and goal-setting, the time trial is important to me because it's really an opportunity to really test your will against an extremely difficult challenge. You all met it yesterday. Next time, and other challenges, won't be easier physically, because you'll always be pushing your limits, but you will have a better sense of your ability to push those limits, and some faith in the strength of your will.

So now you've got this time. If you'll look over to the left, under the moustaches and stolen quotes and race countdown and deadlocked colored water voting, there's a link to the McMillan Pace Calculator. Go there, read his intro, select the 2 mile distance, and enter your time. You'll get a table of your predicted times over various distances.

For an idea of the freaky accuracy, here's my predicted times from last year's time trial time, vs. my personal best:

Two mile time: 15:51

One mile: 7:25 / 6:45 (proud of that one)
5K: 25:44 / 25:39
5 mile: 42:39 / 44:01
10K: 53:27 / 56:08 (a constant source of frustration, but still close)
10 mile: 1:29:34 / 1:31:22
Half marathon: 1:58:56 / 2:04:03 (granted, this was three weeks after a marathon)
20 miles: 3:08:21 / 3:34:41
Marathon: 4:10:51 / 4:44:17

See where the problem hits? Miles 14-16 on. Knowing this, I've changed my own training plan to try to make myself better able to hold pace longer. But generally, you can see the calculator works. The variations are personal quirks about my running - I'm not so good with the 10K distance, for some reason, and then the mile 14-16 thing.

So, I think a lot of folks have a misconception about how pace works. You don't have just one pace that's going to work for racing a mile or racing a marathon.

I don't care how much you joke about being slow or protest that you don't care about your time. I'm not trying to turn anyone into speed-hungry freaks out here. But you need to know what your current level of ability is, and you need to know the paces to run certain workouts and your races at.

You don't want to plod along in a race or a paced training run, because it just gets harder the longer you're out there. Fatigue builds almost exponentially, and the wear on your body increases. If it's cold, or hot, or rainy, it's tougher the longer you're exposed to those conditions. So, you're better off working at the proper pace, even if it's slightly faster than you might otherwise go, for that reason.

You also need to know your ideal pace to set a speed limit, whether you realize it or not. you're going to get excited, and swept up by the crowd in a race. If you're running too much over your pace early on, it doesn't just mean that you'll go slower later - again, the fatigue will build exponentially, and it could even jeopardize you finishing the race. Most of us, including me, with a very solid times I should have been running, learned this yesterday by going out too fast. Don't knock yourself - everyone does it, and it's something you just learn over time and with practice.

The calculator will also tell you what times you should look for in your long training runs. That's a good, but loose guide. If it's wildly different from the times you've been running, talk to me.

So, plug in your times, print out what you got. Ask me any questions you might have. I'll run the numbers myself this weekend and keep a record, but I want everyone to take the responsibility of calculating and keeping track of the paces they should be running - you need to have that level of involvement and ownership in the process.

Good job, and I'll see some of you tonight, and almost all of you this weekend. Saturday, we're all meeting at Whole Foods at 7am, and running either the Beginning 5 or the Beginning 6, routes that will take us to the start area of the marathon and half marathon, through the first few miles of the AT&T course. See you there!