Marathon Training, Round 2

I'm about a month into full swing training for my second marathon, and I wanted to take a moment to compare strategies for this race versus my first, and get some feedback from the helpful minds distributed out there in the blogosphere.

When I was preparing for the Nashville Marathon, I used one of the training programs published by Hal Higdon; Christina and I had used his program to successfully prepare for our first half marathon, so it seemed like a natural transition.  I followed the distances from his Intermediate I progression, but I largely ignored the pacing guidelines.  I can't say that I gave much thought to doing specific tempo or pace workouts, and I only did speedwork about half as often as I was supposed to.  I missed some days here and there, but I more or less stuck to the distances, and when race day came around, I blew away the goals that I had set for myself, so I have to say that it went great.

One thing I wasn't happy with, even though it seems to be almost universal (particularly for new marathoners), was my split - it was terrible!  I ran the second half nearly 15 minutes slower than the first.  I know that a lot of this is race intelligence and strategy that I need to accumulate with more experience, but I also felt that I had something to gain by ratcheting up the total number of miles in my workouts, so my legs would have little more staying power for the second half.

So with that in mind, I'm trying one of the variations of Hanson Marathon Training for Round II.

What does it entail?

• 6 runs per week, of which four are at an easy pace
• Speed work once per week for weeks 2-10, transitioning into "strength" work for weeks 11-17 (see below for an explanation)
• Tempo runs once per week, starting at 6 miles and building up to 10

How is it different?

• Strength workouts - These workouts are done in the same format as whatever speed work you might have been doing, except that you double the number of intervals, and shoot to run 10-20 seconds faster than whatever you goal pace is for the race.
• Frequency - Running 6 times per week, vs. 4-5 with Higdon
• Training Volume - I'm starting out at the high 30's in terms of miles per week, and building up to about 60 miles per week before tapering
• NO (really) LONG RUN - this is probably the most striking difference from the traditional marathon training.  The long runs in this program cap at 16 miles (arguably quite long for many people), rather than going up to 20-21 miles.

Why the change?  Well, I think will help me focus on the areas where I would most like to improve. I think the strength workouts, run frequency and volume of miles all tune into the underlying metabolic and cell level adaptations that will help increase my stamina and staying power.

And on the other hand I don't particularly mind giving up the really long runs, having done the marathon once, I think that I don't need the psychological benefit of rehearsing the distance in training; the linked article above talks about the "myth of the 20 miler".  I haven't actually read or seen any research about this, but I will be poking around to see if I can dig anything up.

In the mean time, training continues, and race day will be the ultimate judge of whether this switch is paying any dividends.