WINNER AGO

A Kendall Miller (Paula’s husband) and Paula and their brand new support vehicle. The run has to start now!

* getting our support vehicle, which turned out to be a really nifty 23-foot Winnebago View motor home;

° supplying the View (almost like setting up a second home);

* getting our Boulder home and household items (like bill paying) in order; and

* setting up rendezvous points along the way with folks who wanted to meet up with me.

A fellow retired University of Colorado project manager and good friend, Deb Mooney, got together with me almost weekly throughout the year to help with the logistics—and to keep me on track. I truly don’t know if I would have finished everything on time or been so thorough without her extra brain power and encouragement.

The nitty-gritty of all the preparations is a blur now, but everything that really needed to be done must have gotten done since the house, the dog, the family, the runner, and the crew all lived through the grand adventure! ps

Stay tuned for part 2 in our March/April issue: “Commence Running!”

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How to squeeze the most from yourself over 26.2 miles. A guide to successful marathon pacing and racing from start to finish.

race below par for their level of fitness. Some of these marathoners run

substandard times because they are novices, still very much stuck on that all-important learning curve. Others run poor races because of errors in pace judgment, misreading the course, failing to adjust for temperature, and the myriad other mistakes that are common even among experienced long-distance runners.

It never ceases to astonish me how many runners toe the 26.2-mile line with no race plan or strategy in mind—they simply start the race and “see what happens.” This is inevitably a recipe for disaster. Not many runners can have a good marathon accidentally, unless the marathon gods Pheidippides and Mercury feel particularly benevolent on that day. However, they are generally unforgiving and are more likely to punish you than to praise you.

Every marathon runner needs a plan for when the gun goes off in their marathon. Without such a strategy, you will drift badly, and when things go wrong your marathon will rapidly turn into an increasingly bad nightmare. I hasten to add that your plan needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the unexpected, such as when things go wrong—but more about this later.

(rte or more of the runners in any given marathon field run their

Here is some advice to try on your next marathon or ultra to save you the agony and despair of the survival shuffle over that seemingly endless final 10K. These are tips gleaned from other runners I have coached over the years and from my own personal experiences. But before we start, here is some homework for you.

Read the following story about my worst marathon and count how many mistakes I made. You should find at least seven or eight glaring, basic errors in judgment. After reading the rest of this piece about how to race your best marathon, look

at the end of the article for the list of mistakes to see how you did. Hint: the story includes 11 mistakes.

How not to race a marathon

I am on the start line of the 1982 Boston Marathon, supercharged on caffeine pills (which I have never taken before) and adrenalin. I have sneaked up to the 20th row of runners from the start line, well above my own pace (2:40), because I want to see Alberto Salazar and the other big guns up front. I am so excited that I haven’t thought through my own race.

It’s very hot already, but I take off like a frightened rabbit at a pace way beyond my current fitness level. I am still feeling good at the halfway mark, in 1:18, where all those pretty young girls from Wellesley College form an exhilarating half-mile-long tunnel to cheer me on, so I pick my pace up to look good, although I know better.

Then my early pace hits me, just as I hit Heartbreak Hill, and I start coming apart. By the time I am at the top of the hill, I want to pull out, but because I am wearing an Auckland running singlet, a drunken spectator yells, “Hey, look everyone, a runner from Nooo Zeeeland.” He literally throws me back onto the course as I try to sneak through the cheering 10-person-deep crowd to quit the race. Oh, dear. I can’t even pull out of this damned race in Boston. In desperation, I slug back the can of beer he offers me, and then trot off.

The rest of the race is a narrowing tunnel-vision blur through 90-degree heat shimmering off the city streets. I am so dehydrated that I have stopped sweating. Increasingly sore legs cause every step to hurt. I just want to stop. At the finish, I feel so weak that I think I might actually die.

An old friend sees me at the finish, figures out I’m a mess, and whisks me to the medical aid station in the Prudential building car park. An IV is administered while my legs spasm and cramp, and I writhe in agony.

Tam only 10 army cots away from winner Alberto Salazar (but he has two IVs), and he finished 40 minutes ahead of me. The second half of my marathon was 12 minutes slower than my first half, almost a minute per mile slower. It takes me a week to be able to walk normally down the stairs and several more weeks of recovery before I feel like even jogging.

This is a true story, and I am not proud to say that it’s my own personal “marathon war story.”

How many mistakes did I make in this race? See page 135.

Choosing your first marathon

If it’s your first marathon, you want it to be as positive an affair as you can make it. Therefore, choose a beginner-friendly course (meaning flat) put on by a wellorganized race-direction company. Beware the hilly course. This handicap will affect your finishing time or even your ability to finish. Choose a flat course, and tun it like a metronome.

The best local marathon’s reputation will precede it, so you won’t have much trouble finding the best marathon to start—just ask around the local running community.

Once you have found the right marathon, if it’s close to home, practice on parts (or all) of the course. This is where you run the course in sections to get used to its idiosyncrasies. This technique alone will give you a big advantage over most of the other competitors.

Your overall marathon plan and strategy

Your basic strategy will depend on the reason why you are doing a marathon. Are you running (1) to win, (2) to achieve a personal best time, or (3) to finish the marathon?

If you are attempting to win the race, your strategies are limited by the fact that you need to maintain contact with the leader or leading group. You have to stay within a reasonable distance to cover anyone breaking away or surging. You have nothing to lose by being there, and in fact you will win either by breaking away from the rest of the pack and hanging on to the finish or by outsprinting your rivals over the last few hundred meters. But this category of runner constitutes only the top 5 percent of the field.

The rest of us mortals who can’t run five-minute-mile pace are the largest portion of the field—probably 95 percent of the starters. We are all aiming to surpass our previous best time for the distance, or if it’s our first marathon, just to finish with some dignity. Runners in this group must learn to run their own race as individuals and to use intelligent pace judgment.

Using intelligent pace judgment and strategy

Pace judgment is the most critical determining factor (after premarathon conditioning, of course) for getting your best marathon time. Very seldom can you start flat out in a race and maintain the pace. In over 20 years of long-distance running and racing, I can remember only two of those fluke races when I raced full bore from start to finish, with all spark plugs firing.

Fluke races simply can’t be counted on, especially over 26 miles. So it’s crucial for you to start your marathon at a pace you can maintain all the way to the

finish. This is extraordinarily difficult for most runners but does improve with every marathon outing.

Accurate marathon pacing is possible because of a computerlike mechanism in our brains that continuously recalculates the maximum pace we can sustain without going over the edge into an anaerobic state. This mechanism considers input on our physiological running set points of things like pace derived from feedback from our muscles, core body temperature, ambient temperature, and possibly respiration rate, all processed with the distance remaining in mind.

This “central governor” mechanism is referred to as teleoanticipation and is emerging as the subject of much study. Unsurprisingly, the theorized basis of this system is thought to originate from our previous experiences in races and training, which is where doing race simulations like time trials, interval training, and races helps by programming the teleoanticipation center in the brain.

Ideally you will run an even pace the entire distance. Better still, the second half of your marathon will be faster than your first. This is called negative splits, and the vast majority of world records from 800 meters up have been achieved in this fashion.

Dr. David Costill, in his book Inside Running: Basics of Sports Physiology, mentions several lab experiments that have duplicated steady state running on treadmills successfully. It is generally agreed among exercise physiologists that steady pacing is the most efficient method of running a race in terms of oxygen uptake.

My wife, Linda, ran a superintelligent race in this manner at her first marathon in Portland, overtaking 600 runners in the last six miles, obviously finishing at a good pace. She told me later that it was a real rush to breeze past all the walking and hobbling runners in that last six miles.

If the second half of your marathon is faster than your first half, you should congratulate yourself for excellent pace judgment. A slight slowdown of one to three minutes in the second half is also acceptable, but any more than that indicates that your pace judgment was faulty.

Runners who can control their early pace with discipline and come through the field in the second half experience a tremendous psychological boost when passing all the early sprinters. This savvy early pace is even more important for the beginning marathoner, whose only goal is to finish. An excessively fast start for this runner inevitably results in walking or the dreaded DNF. Of course, the longer the race, the more the effects of a rash early pace will be felt.

Many pace charts available in books and on the Internet provide you with split times according to your predetermined pace—use them to establish a chart of even split times to carry with you. Consider writing them down on some sort of crib sheet, because your mathematical abilities may decline as you fatigue.

Getting your pace judgment right

You should have some idea of what pace you can maintain through a marathon from your training efforts. Your goal pace must be reasonable and tie in with your previous training performances. Obviously, if you have run a marathon within the past six months or so and are in similar condition, this pace can be used to establish your goal pace.

However, without a recent marathon under your belt, you will need to do a time trial or two over 20 miles to establish your marathon pace. These should be done well before your marathon, say six to 10 weeks before. In these time trials, a Lydiard technique, you go out at slightly faster than training pace and establish a comfortable cruising pace you know you can hold.

This will work out somewhere around 20 to 30 seconds per mile slower than your current 10K race time. Although premarathon training is beyond the purview of this article, let me say here that these time trials, whether they occur over a half-marathon or 20 miles, are a classic case of “suffer now in training, reap the benefits later.”

One research study done on ultramarathoners found that runners with faster times run with fewer changes in speed and are able to maintain their initial speed for a longer distance before slowing down. This means that fast runners reach a steady cruising pace and are able to stick with it. By doing time trials before your marathon, you should be able to experience the same phenomenon.

There are several formulas based on current 10K times (such as your 10K time x 4.7) or best mile times that some marathoners use to estimate their target pace. A word of caution here about these prediction formulas: their big loophole is that some runners can maintain a faster pace closer to their best mile or 20K times than others, presumably because of a higher anaerobic (cruising) threshold. They may also be endowed with a high percentage of slow twitch muscle fibers, enabling them to endure fatigue better than a runner less fortunate. These factors may render such formulas useless unless used only as a vague pace indicator.

These formulas also fail to take into account the topography of the course, the temperature, and the myriad other things, major and minor, that dramatically affect a marathoner’s performance.

Clothing, equipment, and personal body check

Here is some basic advice to avoid problems that have cost many marathoners much skin and blood.

Never wear a brand new pair of running shoes in your marathon. I am always amazed when runners tell me they got a new pair of shoes for their marathon. You need running shoes that are comfortable and have been broken in over long training runs. Do not wear lightweight racing shoes. After an hour or so of pounding, what counts is what is between you and the road, not the weight of your shoes.

Before the start, spread Vaseline on any sensitive body parts that you notice get chafing during your long training runs. The most common sites are nipples (for men, too), the inside of the thighs, the armpits, and the toes. Clip your toenails.

For summer marathons, wear light-colored clothing that breathes well. I have heard of support crews having a new pair of socks and even a fresh T-shirt for their runners in the latter half of the marathon.

lam undecided about polypropylene, nylon, and Lycra. These fabrics may be great for cold-weather marathons, but I suspect these new “quick dry” materials may enhance heat buildup, which will seriously affect your performance in a summer marathon.

Prerace psychological preparation

Prepare yourself mentally for the marathon—it’s not to be taken lightly, so respect it. You must have confidence that you have done enough training to run well or at least to finish. If you haven’t, you have no business starting a marathon—pick on smaller fry like a 10K or a half-marathon.

Ihave known some marathoners who dedicate the race—perhaps to a spouse, a deceased mother or father, or a good cause—anything that will motivate them at a deeper level when the going gets tough.

Premarathon warm-up

Is it really necessary to warm up with a half-hour jog before a marathon or ultramarathon? Considering the energy that you are going to need to get you through the 26.2 miles, err on the cautious side. A slow 10-minute jog is all you will need. Use the first few miles of the marathon to get warmed up and to ease yourself into the race.

You may do a few stride-outs over 50 yards or so, starting slowly and gradually picking your pace up. Do not get carried away with these. Four or five should get your legs used to race pace without fatiguing you. These can be interspersed with some gentle stretching, but avoid vigorous bouncing and straining. That will cause your muscles to tighten up as the stretch reflexes kick in and is counterproductive.

The start

Arrive early enough to have a potty stop and find your correct pace group. Well-organized marathons have minutes/mile signs prominently displayed to indicate where runners of all paces should be starting. Make sure that you start

in the section with runners of similar speed to your goal pace. And stay toward one side of the start area so you will have some room to maneuver when the gun goes off.

Starting farther back in the field means that it may take you a minute or more to cross the start line. It’s OK to start your stopwatch when you cross the start line and use your own timer at the mile checkpoints.

Strongly resist the temptation to get drawn out with the other excited runners in the first five miles. The last thing you need in a marathon is early lactic acid accumulation, accelerated dehydration, depleted glycogen stores, and increased body temperature from an overfast early pace. This mistake will cost you a lot of time over the final few miles.

Don’t exhaust yourself by zigzagging or doing speed bursts between runners in the first mile when the gun goes off. Flow with the crowd, and if you see a gap ahead, gently move into it.

You may find that you cannot get into your normal gait, especially in a larger marathon of over a thousand runners, so shorten your strides and shuffle along until you can. You will need all the energy you can muster later.

Your early-race pace

Run your own race, not everyone else’s, by easing into the marathon. After a mile or two, when things have settled down, your immediate goal should be to establish a flowing rhythm with good style and form.

It’s critical that your early pace is conservative. Marathon coaches often say, “The slower the first hour of your marathon, the faster the last hour.” This is a lot easier said than done, especially when you bear in mind that the competition and excitement of the race will make your early pace seem ridiculously easy. A good guideline, therefore, is to run “within yourself” early. If you do this, you will pass lots of runners in the latter stages of the race.

Here is a tip that takes a lot of faith to adhere to but that will pay enormous dividends from mile 18 on. Consider running 15 to 30 seconds slower per mile in the first five miles than your actual predetermined goal pace. As you pass the five-mile mark, slowly increase your pace slightly. This should be done gradually and comfortably, and you should be champing at the bit to speed up.

Check your time at the early mile markers using your watch that you started when you passed through the start line. Evaluate your pace from the first mile on. Don’t panic if your time is slower than anticipated—you can always pick your pace up later. It is excessive early pace that does the most damage. If this is the case, slow down immediately to your goal pace.

Groups will be clumping together all along the course. If you happen to fit in with a group that is going at your pace, stay with it. If it is too fast or too slow,

move up or down the field accordingly and link up with another group that is closer to your desired pace. The group support can make your marathon a thoroughly pleasurable experience. In the first 10 miles, you can set yourself on autopilot and enjoy the ride.

The middle third of the marathon is usually when you are feeling “in the groove” and your body’s systems are warmed up, integrating, and working smoothly. Despite this smooth patch, you must restrain your pace, no matter how bouncy you feel.

The halfway point

The halfway mark of a marathon is a make-or-break point for many marathoners. You actually need to be feeling good at the halfway mark, as if you have something in reserve. Roger Weatherley, one of my former marathon coaches in New Zealand, master of the event, and 2:19 marathoner, would often tell me, “The marathon doesn’t start until the halfway.”

If you are not feeling good at halfway, one thing is certain—you won’t start feeling better as the second half unfolds! If you are having a bad day, readjust your time expectations, cut your losses, and slow down to a pace that you know you can maintain.

Concentrate on maintaining your pace, rhythm, and good form in the second half of the marathon. Constantly monitor yourself as the marathon progresses. Focus attention on your rhythm, breathing rate, sweat rate, thirst, temperature, soreness, and general comfort level, and modify your pace accordingly.

If you find yourself disassociating at this stage to the point where your mind wanders, refocus and run spot checks every few minutes. Sports psychologists have found that elite marathoners do not disassociate during their races.

Don’t neglect your respiration (breathing) rate. When you are running comfortably, your breathing will be light. As your pace increases, your breathing will be more like a dog panting. If you start panting, slow down, because this means your respiration rate is approaching anaerobic threshold, and you won’t be able to sustain it for long.

Stay relaxed and confident, but be aware that you may start hitting bad patches when physically and mentally you start feeling some wear and tear. You will feel confident if you are still achieving your goal-pace mile markers.

Course familiarity: reading the topography of the course

Familiarize yourself with the course by driving or preferably jogging over part of it before the marathon. The geography of the course cannot be overemphasized as a critical factor in helping or hindering the achievement of your goal. Marathons have been won and lost because of knowledge of the course.

If the course has hills, your goal is to distribute your energy evenly over the entire distance, so you will need to approach and run the hills slower than your goal pace to permit you to get through them unscathed.

Running the corners

Some marathons allow the runners to use the full width of the road on turns by cutting across them, while others don’t. It depends on how the course was measured, so check out the race rules before you start. Any distance you can save your legs is good for them and for your time.

The finish

Very few people say they enjoy the last six miles of a marathon, and you probably won’t either. This is by far the most demanding aspect of the marathon. There may come a point when the rot sets in and you even debate stopping this torture if only to get off your aching legs for a while. You will have muscle soreness, general fatigue, and psychological highs and lows. If you are falling apart, switch to plan B (see the survival advice that follows on the next page).

However, if you can gut it out to the finish, commit and execute, as the military tacticians say. This means that you are in it to the end. Running with another person for some mutual support will help here. Concentrate on trying to use your arms and relaxing as much as is possible. And remembering this one little thing makes the agony more tolerable—the runners around you are experiencing the same torture.

It is useful to memorize something distinctive about a mile from the finish, so you can mentally prepare yourself to speed up from there on in. Before starting your final drive to the finish, gauge how much energy you have left, and then slowly dole it out while attempting to stay as relaxed as possible. Use the stimulus of the crowd to help carry you to the finish. Keep your final pace steady, without breaking into a sprint.

Adjust your race pace according to the temperature and weather

If it’s hotter than you are acclimatized to, be prepared to lower your expectations. Throw your original pace plan out and slow down to a more conservative pace. Remember, hyperthermia can kill.

Stop at all drink stations, especially when the weather is hot or humid. And be sure you have tried the sports drink previously. I’ve seen one major marathon course liberally sprinkled with nasty lime-green pools of upchucked sports drink because most of the runners were not used to it or it was mixed wrong. If in doubt, stick to drinking water. One or two cups at each drink station will work fine.

Drafting (sheltering) versus leading

Let the mugs lead the pack. Never be afraid to shelter behind other runners into a head wind. A 10-minute-mile head wind adds 8 percent to your body’s energy costs, according to one study, but by drafting behind another runner, you reduce this resistance by 90 percent.

Then there is the drafting effect. At 5:00-mile pace, 12 percent of your energy goes toward overcoming air resistance, even on a calm day. By drafting three feet behind another runner, you reduce this by 64 percent. Seasoned marathoners place themselves in this “minivortex” to save energy. And if the wind is behind you, come out wide from the pack, set your sails, and pick up your pace. You will have an advantage over the other runners by doing this.

Using external stimuli

Use the excitement from the crowd to help you—it makes a bigger difference than you think and will help spur you on in the final miles.

Survival advice for when things go horribly wrong

Our body is such a complex machine that we may run flat even if we did everything right before the race. If you are falling apart and feeling like a soldier on the Bataan Death March, ask yourself whether it’s important for you to risk your health by continuing.

If you are still determined to finish, accept that your time will be slower than you had originally planned. Your mental resolve is what will get you to the finish line in this sad situation.

Here is a trick that many a suffering marathoner has used to get to the finish line when the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Walk in short sections of one or two minutes, with a few minutes of jogging between. This can be very effective. Many runners who have tried this are surprised at how little their finishing time is affected.

The postrace evaluation

Don’t forget to analyze what you did right and wrong in your race. You will know if you have run your best marathon because your time will be your best or close to it, you did not have to walk, and you did not feel that you could have pushed any faster.

Make a note of these things so that you can avoid making repeat mistakes next time. Above all, don’t make excuses if you ran foolishly and chose to disregard all common-sense rules. You will feel terrible anyway, which will make it easier to learn from these experiences so your next marathon will be more successful.

Mistakes made during my worst marathon

ee Ee Oo

Experimented with an ergogenic substance never tried before (caffeine is a diuretic).

Started in incorrect pace section.

Had no race plan.

Started race too fast.

Did not slow down for hot temperature.

Did not slow down even though the pace was beyond my capabilities. Picked up the pace even more when hot-dogging at Wellesley College. Wore a singlet that drew attention to myself.

Drank alcohol during a marathon.

Continued the marathon despite hyperthermia signs and symptoms.

. Did not run negative splits—crash and burn! Mp