2022 races

Assuming you were wearing a Garmin chest strap. It would be interesting to see elevation vs cadence.

@TROSaracen This is a tactic I might employ in the future :pray:

I got it I think from this:

https://runnersconnect.net/coach-corner/marathon-race-strategy/

It’s about 10-15 secs/mile slower early. For me it really worked after several ‘bank time for the fade’ horror shows.

Worth doing some efforts at the end on long runs to get used to picking pace up, only 5 or 6 1-2 min efforts. And get your fuelling done by 18 miles I had 4 gels on Sunday last was a caffeinated one at 18.

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This is definitely fitting in with what might work for me. Keeping it slower to start meaning my stomach can still digest. After Manchester when the horrendous stomach pains ruined me. And the amount of gels, I have said again since, I’d only go 4 max. One every 30 mins didn’t help me.

Great article that @TROSaracen thanks.

It’s cramp that’s hit me on every single marathon. Mainly calf cramp, the type that stops you in your tracks.

I took salt tabs and lots of water at my last one in Nov, but they still hit about 2km from home. Luckily managed to just about hobble through with a horrible compensatory heel first gait to save the calves.

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This is pretty much what I did for my pb run. About 10s/km for the first 10k. And then I picked it up for the middle 20k. When you’re in good shape, it’s a great strategy. As you say, a very good way to avoid the banking time mindset that can result in digging yourself into a hole.

I actually tried to adopt it Monday. I was trying to hold back early on, but there’s a balance on downhills. If you hold back too much you’re just sacrificing speed and probably hurting your quads even more by braking harder. I did hit 10k and think about trying to up pace. I felt I could have done slightly, but with thr hills to come I thought that might be aggressive. Probably a good call, and the subsequent explosion may have been even worse if I did!

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I think this pretty much shows similar. Climbs 1 and 3 you can’t really see much of a drop. Climb 2 there is, but on heartbreak it’s very significant. I remember feeling all the strength and power in my legs had disappeared.

You can see some purple sections scattered through the early part where I was trying to up the foot speed on the descents

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Ah perhaps I think I’ve asked for the wrong metric and was after stride length. Cadence is obviously going to decrease with speed when slowing on hills :man_facepalming: Probably saying something you already know, but I was just curious to see if you dropped your stride length down and increased your cadence on the hills as trying to maintain the same as you would on the flats is going to sap more energy.

@stenard hope recovery is going well. As you say Boston is a pretty unique course and probably a ‘quad saving’ strategy trumps overall pacing in importance. Looks like you did pretty well as there was probably an epic explosion/5 mile jog walk finish waiting if you’d made some big errors.

I do remember reading that Boston prep you should do >50% of your hill repeat sessions as run hard down down jog up, rather than the traditional run up jog down, so I think a lot of it is prep for the unique course profile.

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Clumber Park Duathlon & worlds qualification ticked off today.

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Well done, carrying the form well!

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Brilliant!

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It didn’t feel like it at the time had to drop off the pace on the first run as the gel I had pre race was threatening to return, still 36.04 for 9.98km is a positive and then a solid TT to make up the positions lost on the run.

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Excellent work @leahnp usually a good field at Clumber as well. :tophat:

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Superb stuff :+1:
I’m sure I would have seen you without clocking who you were :open_mouth:
Great result !

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Well done @leahnp :clap:t3::clap:t3::clap:t3:

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Well done!

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Well done fella :facepunch::clap:

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400 mile round journey for a bit of wood

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Well done :clap:

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