Mile 225: Marathon Excellence for Everyone with John Davis, PhD

John Davis is a coach, writer, and scientist with a passion for marathon training. His new book, Marathon Excellence for Everyone, combines practical wisdom and the most up-to-date scientific findings in creating a modern marathon training system. The book's plans are thoughtful, scalable, and digestible. It's a must-add to your running library. John holds a PhD in human performance from Indiana University, and he regularly contributes to our body of evidence-based marathon understanding on his website runningwriting.com. There's John Davis on my 225 of "Second Splat." This is the "Second Splat Running Podcast." John, it is a joy to speak with you. Welcome to "Second Splat." Thank you, I'm happy to be here. I have followed your writing for a decade plus now, going back to when you compiled the wisdom and teachings of coaches, Renato Canova and John Kellogg. How did their philosophy inform your marathon system still today and what you wrote about your new book? Yeah, good question. Maybe a bit of background is in order for people who don't know, so John Kellogg was the coach of one of the guys who founded Let's Run.com. Maybe it was a 28-minute 10K guy and he had this mysterious internet guru running coach. John Kellogg would post the early 2000s on message boards about training. He was kind of like a modernized, Arthur Lidier fan, so big mileage, lots of high end aerobic work, and they talked a lot about the science of it. His writing was the first thing that really got me trying to think about, "Can we connect the science physiology to what we do in training?" That big 300-page compilation was one of the first big running-related projects I did, and then Renato Canova, of course, is this Italian coach who's at least one of, if not the greatest coach of all time, has coached world-class athletes from 800 meters all the way up to the marathon, and he comes out of this so-called Italian school of marathon training where everything is percentage-based, and I had a very, like, almost an inverted way of thinking about the problem of the marathon, and from him I learned that the marathon, like any event, has specific demands, and you can decompose the event into its constituent pieces, and then build the race you want from the ground up. Instead of starting from the reverse of a bunch easy running, and then a bunch of workouts and then I'm going to run the race, you can start at the end point of what's my goal, what's the specific demands of this race, and work backwards, and so I've been writing about Canova's training for, like you said, over 10 years now, and I think if I want to highlight what did I learn from each of them? I think from John Kelly, I learned number one, aerobic fitness is the foundation of your performance in all distance events. Obviously that's pretty clear for the marathon, but it's even worth keeping in mind for the 5K. You think of the 5K as like a short speed or into the event, but really it is very aerobically dominated, and then you cannot neglect your aerobic fitness. And then from Canova, I learned both what I just said about breaking down events into their individual pieces, and then I also learned about trying to like see how workouts connect to each other and how workouts connect across time. Canova is very famous for these like very pithy one liners like training is not to replace, but to add. Meaning you don't switch out your old workouts with something completely different. To add new elements to the mix, another like quote of is that really was quite relevant for writing the book was that adaptation is the enemy, which sounds wrong. It's like, no, adaptation is good. That's like how you improve, but his point is once you adapt to some workout, it's no longer in just a meal for your body. So if you're like, I'm going to do 6 by K threshold this week, and then 6 by K threshold next week, and then the week after and the week after, very quickly that workout is nothing new for your body. And so it's not doing anything. You've completely adapted to it. And so it's you need to seek out some new stimulus for yourself. Let's add another big thinker in here to John Kellogg and Rodano Canova, but maybe in the exercise science space, we interviewed Andy Jones a couple years ago, and he described his basic marathon training philosophy as you do the intensity and then you fill in as much volume as possible around that. Maybe in ways than a bit of an inversion of what you spoke to from John Kellogg, priority on the intensity, get as much volume as you can in the gaps in between. So considering all these thinkers and how your marathon philosophy has evolved over time, what's your position on that classic interplay between volume and intensity and marathon preparation? Yeah, I always like to think about things like from the end, like, okay, we're trying to run around 26 miles as fast as we can. Clearly the most specific thing for that is, like Andy Jones says, run intensity, running long and fast for the marathon intensity is running long and fast. So then the question is, all right, like, and maybe you're like, okay, my best big workout is going to be 20 miles at 95% of marathon pace, or maybe it's going to be 5 by 4k at marathon pace with a 1k float. So that's 25 km, almost 16 miles of quality, averaging very close to marathon pace. Those are really hard workouts and you're not going to just like do those right away and it's going to be really hard to do those without enough volume to support it. So the volume is like the foundational piece of your ability to go long. And that's very like John Kellogg, very Arthur Lidier in the sense of like, you know, easy volume is is the base of the foundation, but I think what Canova would say, the Canova approach is like, there's also a foundation of speed. So like 5k pace is, you know, much faster to do, maybe 12, 15% faster than marathon pace. But 5k pace is a foundation of speed for the endurance work you do. So the, you always want to have like, you always want to be able to articulate what role at any particular session, even, you know, 5 mile easy jog, what role is that playing and training and like for that, you know, 20 mile work that I quoted. If you can't do 20 miles easy, it can be really hard to do 20 miles fast. And so the volume is the foundation for the volume of easy volume is the foundation for volume of intensity. And likewise, shorter speed where you can do some 800s of 5k pace, it's going to make it a lot easier to do, mile repeats of 10k pace, it's going to make it a lot easier to do alternating kilometers at half marathon pace. And then like 10 or 15% slower than that, which is a more specific marathon workout. So we're kind of, volume and intensity are like the two ends of like an hour class or something. We're kind of funneling towards the middle. Yeah, I love the Canova funnel analogy, we're sprinkling ingredients all around the funnel and then getting more specific as we move toward the event. So let's use that as a transition then to your marathon training plans that you lay out in the new book, moving chronologically through a training period. What does the base phase for marathoning mean to you, John? So it's actually exactly that idea I was articulating and I think in the book, I actually used the word general phase to try to drive home the idea that like sometimes in conversation I will call it a base phase or sometimes a Italian school they call fundamental phase. I like general though, because it kind of, it shortcuts around people's thinking of like, oh, base is easy mileage, base is actually those two opposite ends. It's volume, easy volume. And then also the basic components of fitness, which turns out scientifically, intensity is pretty good to stimulate. So view to max, for example, easier to stimulate that by doing higher intensity workouts. You're building up the separate pieces that you're going to eventually put together. So you're doing some long runs, you're doing some fast stuff, but you're not going long and fast and you're not going long and fast at speeds close to marathon pace. That's for later, but you got to get all the pieces in place. So what that actually concretely looks like is in this like modern interpretation of marathon training, it's more like, it looks more like kind of hybrid year round training that you see some people doing or like, they do some volume to do some long runs, they do some kind of threshold booking work, they do some kind of 5K, 10K looking work, they do some more kind of effort based pickups. and there's a kind of a broad spectrum of speeds that they're running and in the later concentrate that. How do you set those paces in the early general phase? So that is a perennial question for people, especially if maybe you've never done a marathon. So you're like, you read all this stuff about like super advanced marathon training and it's like one blah blah, everything's percentages of marathon pace and you're like, I don't know what my marathon pace is. What do I do? So did I just do the pairs I want to run? How do I know that is? So the solution that I came up with for the plans was I use percentages of 5k pace because almost anybody, high school, college, club, recreational, marathon or almost anybody knows what a 5k means. And if you don't, you can just hop into 5k next weekend and then you'll find out. And then actually in the scientific chapters of the book, there's quite a lot of my own research showing that these various percentages of 5k pace do actually correspond quite well with more traditional like lab-based physiology testing because in a perfect world, you'd go get a full lab workout than you'd have like your LT1 and LT2 estimated paces and your VIA2 max and you could do it. But I mean, look for 99 out of 100 people, that's just that's not happening. So the solution that came up with is percentages of 5k pace. Got 100%, 95%, 90%, 85%, 80%. And the nice thing is there's this kind of this sort of shorthand I call the 5% rule where every 5% slower you go, that's about a doubling of the distance you can run. So conveniently 95% of 5k pace is about 10k pace. And then 90% of 5k pace is about half marathon pace. Half marathon is 21k, it's strictly doubling to be 20, but you know, close enough. So you can also map those like individual points on that spectrum to effort levels that you might be familiar with. So in a perfect world, you have a big marathon build. How long are we going to stay in this general phase? Let's say for example, John, just this past weekend, we had CIM, we had Valencia, and somebody's already looking ahead to those events a year from now. And that's the next marathon on the board. How long would you recommend staying in that general phase and sprinkling in all those elements? So I think ideally you want at least five or six weeks, often more. And it depends a little bit on what mileage you're going to peak at and how experience you are, because the, remember, the whole point of a base is to like support the thing on top of it, right? And so interestingly, like the bigger your base, so like either the longer you do base training or the more mileage you do and the longer faster workouts you do in base training, that actually supports a longer period of marathon specific work. So if you have a lot, if you have, you know, 24 weeks of training, you can say like, okay, I'm going to do like six or seven weeks of marathon specific training, six or seven weeks of marathon supportive training, and then back it up with, you know, lots and lots and lots of face behind that. But if you're like, look, I'm pretty busy. I can really only do 40, maybe 45 miles a week in this build. You actually want your marathon specific and supportive phases to be shorter, like only like three or four weeks, maybe. So then that would say basically like, okay, block off those shorter chunks. And then everything behind that, ideally, six, eight, maybe 10 weeks is general work, is base building. Because the problem you have basically is like, if you kind of get, if you, if you, if you build too big of a house for the foundation underneath it, things start to collapse. And so if you try to, if you try to maintain your, like those really big marathon workouts for too long of a stretch of marathon specific training, then you'll find your fitness is deteriorating because you haven't been, you, you didn't have enough of that, like, speed and volume base to support what you were doing. It was, you know, gradually deteriorating, and then you go on long enough and starts being a problem. So that's one of those things where like, it, it isn't just like, oh, everybody's got to do eight weeks of base training. And then everybody does eight weeks of specific training. And that's it. It depends and scales with your volume and your level of experience. Do you like your athletes to spend time away from the marathon in 5K, 10K type training blocks to even further buttress that foundation? Yeah. If someone has done two or three marathon cycles in a row, I do like to have them do either a sort of like a mini cycle of eight, 12 weeks or even a full season focusing on something other than the marathon. Often 5K 10K is a good choice when people, but often what happens is like you do a marathon, go as well, you do another marathon, go as well, you do another marathon. And you, you're, you're kind of getting to the limit of what your 5K 10K fitness will support. And then it can help to get that, that sort of speed foundation better to support the ability to keep going faster in the marathon. But that's only one option. Sometimes I've also had people to take a break from marathoning to do ultra marathon, or do like trail races, or even just take a like a stretch of unstructured time that actually seems to be pretty helpful for like career longevity. I've had a couple athletes that I've worked with for like 10 years now and are who are still, you know, setting personal records. And something that seems to help with them is like every couple of years or every couple of racing seasons, they'll take, you know, four, five, six weeks, just like they're running, but they're not training at all. And they're really, you know, kind of like mentally refreshing and relaxing. You kind of need to know yourself. There's some people where if they get out of the habit of just, you know, next thing you know, they haven't run in three months. And that's not so good. But I do think, especially if you're somebody who's like just like trained for a marathon, trained for a marathon, trained for a marathon, it can help to do something else for a while afterwards. Yeah, so to extend our foundational metaphor, maybe it's flipping that, raising the ceiling by moving to those faster events. But also, yeah, I like the way you phrase that, I guess, a change is a rest in its own way and allows you to not just physically, but mentally get ready for a marathon cycle. I know this is maybe not the focal point of the book, but you do discuss this to a degree, just the mental engagement level that comes with being locked into a training cycle. Concerns about perhaps burnout over the long term. What are some recommendations you have to mitigate that for folks who love marathoning, but as you said, maybe it's just the only event they see themselves doing. Yeah, the biggest thing is making sure you mentally recover after the marathon, because unlike a 5K or 10K, right, hey, run the 5K and challenging, but then come back fine in a day or two. Marathon is so mentally draining that your psychological reserves are quite drained for a while afterwards. And so I really emphasize trying to make sure you're like mentally refreshed before you start up with training again. And so that can look like taking a bit of break from structured training, even if you're still going for a run, that can look like doing things for a couple of weeks, like doing group runs or driving somewhere really nice to run in nature or something that'll like get you more engaged and enjoying the running you are doing. I would actually rather have people do a shorter training cycle where they're really ready to go when they start versus, oh, I got to get training right away again, because you know, Chicago's in 16 weeks or 18 weeks and I got to be right, I'd rather have people be fresh and have a shorter cycle than drag themselves into something longer that they're not fully motivated for, because it's not just the marathon that stuff, it's also those those marathon-specific workouts in the long run. So those are also mentally challenging, like you need to be very very ready to go for them. And then you need to take care to recover well afterwards, both physically and mentally in training too. Yeah, I love that, Tom. So you spoke to the general phase, then let's move to that marathon-supported phase. What's our focus in that timeframe? So the focus is basically running long and running fast, not necessarily running long and fast really close to marathon pace, but we're starting to put together the pieces. So like sort of brass tax wise, we're focusing mostly on 90 and 110 percent of marathon pace. So that's like 10k-ish pace and then about 10 percent back off from marathon pace. With some emphasis at about 95 and 105 percent of marathon pace, 105 would be about half marathon pace. And then some moderate volume workouts at marathon pace. So you're starting to kind of narrow in from both sides on marathon pace, building the ability to go long at a good strong pace at about 90, maybe progressing to 95 percent of marathon pace. And then taking some of that like foundational speed and extending it with workouts like five by mile at 10k pace, that'd be about 110 percent of marathon pace or four by 2000 meters workouts like alternating 1k at 105 percent of marathon pace, 1k at maybe 85 or 90 percent. So you're building up the the abilities that support your marathon specific fitness, which is 100 percent supported by 105 and 95. Now let's dig into those abilities a little bit more. First on the slower and more towards 90 percent. Maybe what we'll call that steady long run. It might be in the LT1 range perhaps. What is the magic that's happening there, John? It can be difficult to describe to someone exactly how that feel is going to compare to marathon day, but there is a huge amount of carryover. What's happening? So actually, the term you just mentioned LT1 is sort of the key to understanding why that kind of a workout is different than your long, easy run, or a long run where you could go in a little bit faster than normal at the end. Basically, once you're above this, this first lactate threshold of LT1, you are in a, it's called a different domain of intensity. The actual pattern of physiological response from your body is different. The two things that are different are number one, you're recruiting more fast twitch fibers, and number two, your slow twitch fibers are losing efficiency over time. And so you have to start like recruiting more fibers and recruiting more of them being fast twitch fibers. You're also burning more carbohydrates for energy and you have more, higher ambient levels of lactate in your blood, which is going to get your body starting to use some of that lactate actually as a fuel. And the other workout, the other kind of workout, the 105, 90% alternating, is like really jump starting that exact ability, taking that elevated from baseline stable over time, but elevated lactate level and using that lactate as a source of fuel. Because remember, where lactate comes from is just, you take sugar, you split it in half, you do a little biochemical pathway, and then you've got two lactate molecules. And those are carbohydrates, you can burn them aerobically for energy. And that's one of the really important adaptations that you're trying to create in your body. Let's go to 105 or 110% thin at the opposite end that you were referring to, lactate threshold, the LT2 type work, maybe to 10k pace, threshold training generally, and the Norwegian model more specifically have been at the forefront of training discussion in recent years. I'd like to unpack how you position those a bit more within marathon training. So first, for advanced higher mileage athletes, how do you choose between single threshold days, perhaps once or maybe even twice per week versus implementing double threshold sessions within a day? Yeah, so the double threshold idea is basically, okay, we have this problem of like, we want to do a lot of threshold volume in the week. How do you distribute it in the lowest stress way possible? And it turns out for athletes above a certain volume, and who are trying to get a certain amount of threshold in, you know, 30 kilometers, 40 kilometers in a week, turns out splitting it into sessions of in the morning, some in the morning, some of the evening is lower stress on your body, because you don't have to like really go down kind of to the limits of your endurance in that high end aerobic domain of running. And that is a useful thing to do in general and support a training for the marathon, but from a specific training perspective, you actually, something you don't want to do it, it's that double threshold is intentionally not, and I also lower volume single threshold are intentionally not specifically doing the specific like, fatiguing your body in a marathon specific way, because that's what makes the marathon hard is that like you have this aerobic steady state and you're like going and going and going and going and it's so much volume. And that's what makes it challenging. And so doing, you know, let's say 16 kilometers in one session, that's quite a big stress in your body to a greater extent than splitting it into 8K in the morning or 8K in the evening, or taking that and doing it like an 8K single threshold workout on Monday 8K is single threshold workout on Wednesday. So I think the both the single and the double threshold approach can be useful in general and supportive training. And then there is actually a way to use, and there's a chapter in the book on double threshold where I talk about how to do this is advanced technique I've used with higher mileage runners where you again leverage the lower stress nature of double threshold in marathon specific training to do like a midweek workout. So it's not the big work out of the week, but you're kind of you're sneaking in a little bit more aerobic volume in a really low stress way. But basically to directly answer your question about single versus double, it depends how much volume you're trying to get. And if you're like, I'm only going to do 8K or 10K total threshold work in the day, it doesn't make sense really to do to do double threshold. I would say probably 12K of work is the minimum where I would consider splitting it into two if your schedule allows it. So the longer single session and I you're suggesting would more closely replicate the demands of the event as opposed to the double session when we get to our specific marathon trainings. That correct? Yeah, I mean, a good way to think about it is like, okay, workout number one, 10 by K threshold, one minute walk. Pretty, you know, it's a higher volume workout, but pretty standard, not super hard. Work out B, 10 by 1K at threshold, but the recovery is going to be 1K at, let's say, 90% of marathon pace. So it's still the same amount of running at threshold, but now that's a 16 kilometer, 10 mile run, averaging what probably, you know, 96% or so of marathon pace. So that's much more marathon specific in that it's long, it's fast, and it's at a speed that's pretty close to marathon pace in comparison with 10 by K with a minute walk. So then you can actually like, you can sort of interpolate between those two. You can go from like classic single single threshold and then gradually transition to doing longer, more kind of float recovery style intervals between the repeats and turn it into a marathon specific workout. It's interesting, you mentioned a few moments ago, if you're not reaching a certain amount of volume at threshold within your training, it's unlikely necessary to move to a double sessions, but do you believe that most of us could more generally benefit from more threshold training within our broader marathon cycle? I think I would put it as most people would benefit from more high end aerobic training. Yeah, that's also fair. And that's, so the high end aerobic family is bigger than just this like very, you know, 4.0 millimoles of lactate obsessed, like kind of magic pace approach. High end aerobic family also includes things like long continuous runs at either what you know is marathon pace or like sometimes like Conor Mance and Clayton Young do predicted marathon pace. They'll do like eight or 10 miles at predicted marathon pace, which is like, okay, on paper based on my 5K or 10K or half marathon, I should be able to run this for marathon. Maybe I can't do it yet, but whatever. I'll still do it for eight or 10 miles continuous. That's also a high end aerobic workout. A Kenyan style progression run where you start really easy and then work down to something kind of close to a little faster than marathon pace and finish even faster than that. That's also high end aerobic. Some of this like sub threshold that's maybe two, three, four percent slower than like classic Daniel style cruise intervals. And then what I just say about the classic like 20-minute tempo Daniel style cruise intervals. Those are also high end aerobic. It's basically physiologically between LT1 and LT2. It's this whole family of paces that have a similar physiological effect in your body. And you can kind of trade off between like, there are some benefits of going long and continuous and getting more volume, doing something like eight or 10 miles at predicted marathon pace. And then there's different benefits of doing something like eight or 10 by K, lower volume, but a little bit closer to that like fastest aerobic steady state pace that you could sustain. So I'm a believer in using the full family and not trying to just narrow it on one specific thing. But Rodley would say yes, those people would benefit from doing more high end aerobic work. That is an immensely valuable distinction that high end aerobic family of sessions. Very important. I'm going to ask you to put on both your scientist researcher hat here and also your coaching hat as we get into the weeds about these sessions. Is it this specific physiological stimulus that's brought out by those sessions that's most valuable? Or is it that we can do them consistently without excessive amounts of load? It allows us to keep training, keep compiling, stacking, week on week. Is that in practice what's the most valuable or is it the actual physiological adaptations that we're getting or perhaps it could be both? Yeah, I would say it's a little bit of both. The physiology is important in that I think high end aerobic work is qualitatively helpful in a way that pure easy mileage is not. Some people are, there are many training approaches that are basically, they leverage the consistency idea, but they do it with just pure easy mileage for long slow distance or low heart rate based training zone two. The whole idea is like consistency and volume above all, and you achieve that consistency and you reduce that injury risk as much as possible by keeping the pace really really slow. But I think doing the high end aerobic work is is particularly useful because of some of the physiological benefits of it. And then from like a load perspective, yeah, it's true that like if you're doing workouts at like classical view to max pace, like you just can't do 10K of work at that, whereas if you run 10K at marathon pace, like no problem, that's totally, totally doable workout. So some of it is like, it is high quality work that you can do for a high amount of volume. And then some of it is just the actual like physiological benefits are useful. And like especially for the marathon, like an even half marathon 10K, these are paces that are specific to the race in the sense of being within plus or minus 5%. It's less obvious to me that like if you're training for the 800 meters, you want to be doing tons and tons and tons of threshold work only. I don't think that's as effective. And I would maybe say the same thing about like the 100K, where yeah, like it's sort of a foundational general ability to have a high threshold. But the specific demands of the event for the 800 meters is running very fast for two minutes or so. For the 100K, it's running very, very far. And so that's another aspect to keep in mind too, is that like these high-ender paces happen to be specific or supportive to the most popular racing distances, which all physiology aside, like you just know that like more specific training is gonna be useful for whatever event you're doing. - Yes, so as we move to the marathon specific phase, maybe what are the sessions or the stimuli that you protect and prioritize in these training plans? - I would say number one is workouts at marathon pace. And those basically come in two flavors. One of them being continuous runs. So 10 miles, 12 miles, maybe 15 or 16 miles as like your biggest workout. Continuous at marathon pace. Or the other flavor is the more Italian style, alternating kilometers where you might do like seven by two K at marathon pace, one K at 90%. And next time you might do six by three K, one K, or five by four K, one K, where you're essentially like stringing together marathon pace for longer and longer and longer without stopping. And importantly, your flow recovery is still at a high end aerobic pace, still at an intensity that's going to keep you burning lactate for fuel, stressing your fast twitch fibers, causing the kind of high end aerobic fatigue that is gonna affect you at the end of the marathon. So that's one category of workout, 100% marathon pace. And the other one is the long fast run. Primarily that's gonna be 95% of marathon pace. For less experienced runners, sometimes our lower volume runners I'll have them do like a step wise progression where it would be like six miles, then six miles, then six miles at maybe 90, 92, 94% for each chunk. So you're not doing 95 straight away from the get-go at lower volume. Although you might do that if you're running 65, 75, 85 miles a week. So long fast run and then marathon pace workouts. Those are the two most important things. That continuous marathon pace run, it's fascinating because it feels like it's the most specific, but of the things that you mentioned, it also feels like it's perhaps the highest risk because of its intensity, it's both very intense, but also not as intense as what you're going to experience on a race day. If that makes sense, it's both a lot, but also not enough because we don't get to the point of 20, 22 miles like we see in a race. So from a, maybe what we call here high risk low risk perspective, or best bang for your buck, what's the one session there that you really like to include? So those reasons are exactly why I prefer and most of the marathon excellence plans use the Italian style alternating kilometers because there's not just like kind of a physical risk, but also the mental risk of like, if you're supposed to do 12 miles of marathon pace and like it doesn't feel good, six weeks or seven weeks out from the marathon, it can be very demotivating and you can avoid that by doing two K1K or three K1K, where it's all right if that feels, if the continuous block is a little bit above what you could really do continuously right now because you have that flow of recovery. So if you really put me to it and said, okay, one marathon-specific workout, I would say either three K1K or four K1K. So alternating between marathon pace and about 10% slower. You can adjust so that float recovery 1K, if you're less experienced, it should probably be more like 85%. And if you're really, really strong, some of my best athletes can actually do like 92 or even 94%, they can float really, really close to marathon pace. And the idea is like you wanna be feeling like you're actively recovering there not just like hanging on by your fingernails. And you can kind of see your fitness improving as the pace that you can float at goes up. And you're like, oh, actually, I'm only backed off like 8% for marathon pace. And this feels so easy. I feel like I could just go all day at this. And then you get back into it and then you float again, recover, get back into it. So I like that not only because it has less kind of mental danger, but you get more volume. And so you don't have that problem of like, you do 10 miles of marathon pace. It's hard, but you're like, gosh, you still have 16 miles to go with this pace. So because of that float recovery, you also get, I used the example of 1K, 1K earlier. You know, that's only 10K of work, but it's 20K of fast running. So you kind of stretch out the ball. You get a little bit more volume out of the workout and somewhat of a lower risk way. - That's what I said. So you've reached this marathon specific point in training. How do we set a marathon goal pace? - I like having a current fitness estimate. We're like, okay, and you don't even need to think about this early on in training. Don't think about this as like marathon pace for the full marathon, you know, this weekend. Think about it as like, oh, my friend wants me to pace them through like 16 miles. And what's the fastest pace that I'd be comfortable saying like, yeah, I could do it for, I could do this for 16 miles evenly, don't ask me to go any faster than that, but I could do that pace. I would call that your current marathon fitness estimate. As you get closer to marathon pace, you should be monitoring how those workouts are going. And then once you've done some of those big long fast runs, 95% of marathon pace, and though those big, you know, maybe you do five by four K, 1K, you can ask yourself, okay, like, do I really feel like I could do this for the marathon? And if you have that workout felt really easy, you can bump the pace up. If it felt too hard, you can bump it down. And ideally, what you would like is to see steady progress in your current fitness estimate. That eventually, three, four, five weeks out from the marathon, maybe a little bit further out, becomes your goal pace. I don't believe in like, okay, it's week one of 18. And my goal is 259. And I'm just gonna choose that goal and stay with it. I don't like that because number one, often it makes you work out too hard early on in training. That's not good. You don't, you need to work with where you're currently at, especially when you're building up fundamental fitness, your general fitness. But even, you know, later on in training. And then number two, I think actually sometimes people can, they can limit themselves by focusing on, like in some narrow goal, like they're too obsessed with like the short term number and they don't see what their potential is long term. So sometimes I'm trying to get people to stop thinking about the goal pace further out and just focus on building up their basic fitness capacity. And then sometimes it turns out they just go like 10, 15, 20 minutes faster. And maybe that wouldn't have happened if they'd been really obsessed about that, like 305 to three hours or three hours or 257 from the get go. - Do you ever encourage them to just completely throw out goal pace altogether for an entire cycle and look longer term, maybe inexperienced marathoners? Do you say, hey, how can we get on the board and just try to get as fit as possible with long term growth as the focus? - Yeah, occasionally. I think the, I do that more with shorter race distances. I think what the marathon is like, you, it's way less forgiving than like the 5K, where you get a lot out a little fast in the 5K. Yeah, what are, you know, slow down in the middle and you finish fast at the end or like, you can kind of self-regulate in a half marathon. It's not like disastrous. Marathon though, like you really don't wanna get out like way crazy fast. And so within, if we're like, you know, four to six, basically once we start doing workouts as a percentage of marathon pace. And this is one of the other reasons why, by the way, using 5K pace as a basis of fitness during general training is useful 'cause it gets you away, 'cause it's doing exactly what you suggested. But once we start doing workouts with marathon pace as the basis, it helps to have something penciled in. And that might be, hey, let's just try to get something on the board, I think, you know, 330 or 320 or whatever might be a reasonable thing for now and we can always change that. But once you start doing workouts off of some, you know, number, you gotta have some, you gotta get a start with something. - Sure, yeah, we just, uh. Often we'll get ourselves in the trap of some round number that we think looks good and now we're just throwing darts at a board and trying to see what sticks. How do you like or dislike using longer tune up races through the build to a marathon? I think they can be very useful in marathon supportive training. And to some extent, the general phase two, I don't love doing like a really serious half marathon in the general phase. It's like maybe fine to do one kind of just for fun as a long run replacement, you know, a long fast run replacement can be really useful to do a 10k or a half marathon or 10 mile or something in marathon supportive training because it could be the training you're doing is quite specific for that and be it can help you figure out what kind of shape you're in. This is maybe less a little, I don't know controversial or uncommon, I'm not a big fan of racing at all during the last four to six weeks before the marathon because I really want to prioritize those big marathon specific workouts we talked about and then recovering well afterwards. Sometimes you can sneak a half marathon in there maybe, but I don't love in general running a race within six weeks in the marathon part of it also is the mental piece to because if you are designing your training well those last several weeks of marathon training aren't really about getting you faster in a way you would see in a 10k or a half marathon. It's actually about finding those last 10 miles of the race making sure you can actually sustain marathon pace for the full distance. I mentioned that example of like the pace you could you could help your friend through 16 miles with one way of thinking about marathon specific training is like you're trying to take that 16 turn it to 18 to 20 to 22 to 24 to 26. It's pretty common in the last maybe two months in marathon training for your current fitness estimate to not change what your workouts to improve in the sense of going further at the same speed. For that reason also I'm not the biggest fan of doing races in the last certainly for and probably six weeks of training before the marathon. I can know this principle of extension we speak to there if nothing else with a half marathon that late in training that the taper into it and recovery out of it if you're trying to run as fast as possible is coming at the expense of time that you could be doing marathon specific training. John your plans suggest a slightly shorter taper period than what we see in much of the research literature why is that. Just empirically I found it works better part of why it works is that the marathon specific phase maybe something we haven't quite mentioned yet is. In addition to doing those bigger workouts you're also taking more recovery afterwards so it's like big stress big recovery afterwards and so you unlike marathon supportive or general training you go into the marathon specific workouts feeling pretty fresh and pretty good you're not just like tired all the time from doing mileage. So sometimes it's like you're sort of doing a miniature taper almost every week but in another sense like if you're at a point where those those long fast runs are going well you arrive ready to go you run them they go well you recover well afterwards. I don't really want to change too much like I just like I'm not hoping for any race day miracles I just want the race to go to be the final like progression of what we do in training the one way of thinking about like what we're doing with the the marathon pace workouts and the 95% marathon pace workouts is like the 95% workouts get a little bit further you know 18 20 22 miles. And the marathon pace workouts like progress closer and closer to running marathon pace uninterrupted so you go from 2k 1k which is like what 66% of the running is at marathon pace 33% 2k 1k 3k 1k 4k 1k so by the end there it's 80 20 and then the marathon is kind of like those those last two things the long fast run the longest fastest run and the the biggest marathon specific workout just converge and you just run. You're running 100% of marathon pace uninterrupted for now 26 miles instead of you know 22 and so with that kind of for wave like progression you don't need to be like okay and now I got to change everything or I got to really tank my mileage for like three or four weeks. And then like hope that I'll just run a lot faster also like I said it numerically like I had several years ago several instances where I would look back at an athletes training after marathon and I'd be like I wish we had just done the marathon like two or three weeks earlier and not done this big taper. And so I just basically what I started doing is like taking the train taking a 20 week training calendar and then just deleting the last two weeks you know 20 weeks with a traditional taper delete the last two weeks or delete weeks like 18 and 19 and then just like shift back and now it's an 18 week plan and the taper is shorter and just like worked better. Yeah if you're counting on a big taper to save you for race day perhaps you've overcooked those steps on the way there right yes yeah yeah and that's like that's sometimes you can end up there and like trying a big taper is the best you can do but if you can avoid it it's better it's much better to be like okay like you know I got my I can my biggest long run in the bag. You did hit it recovered well feeling good again got my biggest marathon specific workout hit it recover well feeling good now I do the marathon. All this is great assuming we can execute on race day and we can have a perfect training plan but make mistakes on race day and unfortunately we lose all that what are your favorite pieces of advice for race day execution. So the biggest one is like I want people to have a plan but I also want them to be mentally ready to roll with a punches because the marathon is 26 miles like something's going to go wrong I can promise you that so you just want to be ready for whatever crazy stuff is going to happen in the race. But that's not a reason to not have any plan going on so basically I walk through in the book what I do for my one-on-one athletes which is like look at okay what's the course like what's the conditions the weather you know. Or what's the how competitive is the race this is a little is a little bit more relevant for fast runners but even like you might want to know is there going to be a pace group for four hour pace is there going to be a pace group for three 45 base. Because that's going to affect the dynamics of who you're running with and then you want to have you know you don't need to have like the printed out wristband with every single mile split but you want to have some. A pace plan where like okay I want to start here kind of work down to about this pace by say five miles maintain it through the middle and then try to close after say 20 miles. So having a rough pace plan and kind of like a mental plan I like breaking the race in the chunks so you don't have to think about it as 26 miles and interrupted you can think about it as like okay first five miles stay relaxed work down into my pace. Five miles to 15 miles like stay smooth stay efficient and then after that you know start moving up start trying to catch people and then really push the last time four miles some way of breaking it up in the chunks like that I think is really really helpful from a mental perspective. Yeah for most mortals who are out beyond that low to our market of marathon thinking about that as a continuous 26.2 mile run is just a bit overwhelming we have to find ways to make that a shorter more approachable race I like what you suggest. John let's move to a few quick hitters here before they let you go first how might you modify the plans for a young athlete versus a master's athlete. Yeah so the I would say with young athletes it actually your training age matters and like your intensity age like how much intensity you've been doing because it's say say you're 24. It's very different if you're like I ran in high school and I ran in college versus like I started running for for for fun and for health two years ago and now I want to run a marathon those those two athletes even if they're both 24 I mean a bit of a different. A different place but I would say if you're a if you're sort of young training wise you want to spend more time building up those general fundamental pieces of fitness so you spend more time in base training you want to spend more time doing kind of like threshold sub threshold predicted marathon pace 5k pace 10k pace and spend less time doing the big long fast stuff because you need to grow and develop your training over time. I always try to tell people like both in individual workouts and also like season to season leave some headroom for growth here where like don't just try I'm just going to do the crazy as most intense workout ever like right now like no let's you know let's let's not do that let's not do 18 miles at marathon pace right now let's do like 14 and then next year you can do 15 and then maybe 16 year after that. So the younger you are the the bigger you need the more you need to focus on the base for a master's runner presumably you know you've got quite a big lifetime based drawn so number one you're training cycles don't need to be as long number two you don't need to spend as much time. time doing that like fundamental training. And number three, you know, you kind of want to work with your body in terms of what is possible for you in terms of stress and recovery, because it doesn't make sense to do gigantic sessions you can't recover from. But it also doesn't make sense to try to pretend like you're 25 and you're just going to run, you know, big mileage and big workouts all the time. You need more, you're going to find that you need more recovery after workouts and you can actually benefit from from bringing your mileage down and leveraging the fact that your non-workout days are shorter and easier to become able to do or support your ability to do either bigger or longer or faster workouts than you've been doing recently. So essentially it's more of like a big stress, big recovery and more of training looks like that marathon specific work in the eight, both like in the terms of the work as you do, but also in terms of like the structure of concentrating the distribution of intensity during the week into like a discrete session where you push and then you really recover afterwards and push again, you really recover afterwards. For masters runners, you just want to make sure that ceiling isn't crazy high because you know, it just doesn't make sense to do workouts that are going to destroy your body or that you can't recover from. To extend, how might you change the training plans for someone on a non-traditional cycle, say nine or ten days instead of the at least American staple of a seven day training week? Yeah, whenever I coach someone who is able to do that with their schedule, it's actually really nice because you can kind of have the workouts like cycling almost independently of one another. You don't have to be like, okay, I'm going to do a long fast run every two weeks. I'm going to do a half marathon pace workout on Wednesday every other week. You can be like, I'm going to do a long fast run every 15 days and then I'm going to do a half marathon pace workout every 10 days and I'm going to do 10k pace every nine days and just kind of let them fall where they may on the calendar. The way to leverage that is to think about your workouts as like being attached to a certain number of recovery days afterwards. So maybe some like, you know, very chill effort-based threshold, fart-like session might be like that workout on one day and then just one easy day afterwards. So it's kind of like a two day block and you just drop that down to your schedule. But something like maybe in the general phase, like 14 miles at 80% to 5k pace, it's a pretty big long fast run. So that run, you might need three days. So that's like a four-day chunk that you can drop onto the calendar. And so depending on whether you want to be completely free form or whether you want to have some non-traditional like cycle of nine or 10 or 12 or whatever days, you can kind of like block it out in terms of like this workout plus this much recovery afterwards and this that workout and that much recovery afterwards and kind of like kind of slide it together like those kids like block puzzles. You get the you get the right number of blocks in the row. It's great. In an ideal world, how much time do you recommend between marathons for most people? I think ideal world like 16 weeks is ideal minimum. In practice, I have a lot of people who do less than that. And like I said earlier, the way to do that is to actually make sure you recover well physically and psychologically. Paradoxically, it's actually it's easier to recover when you really fit. I think some people find themselves like struggling to get back into running after marathon because like they just weren't very fit, weren't very marathon fit. Maybe they did a lot of mileage or maybe they did a lot of like, you know, threshold or shorter workouts. But they didn't do that marathon specific stuff. And so the marathon was so much longer and so much faster that the recovery is really tough. That actually is harder to get back into training afterwards. It's I've had people do 12 weeks, even sometimes less. It's more individual. Anything less than that is is I would say challenging to do. But you know, that's ideal world. I realized like you get into some race last minute or whatever. I'd like kind of got to do what's pragmatic for you. Sure. What do you see as the next frontier in training? Maybe it's the thing that will be more invoked if we have this conversation again in a few years. Something that I think is almost certainly on the horizon. And like almost there in terms of like working is what I call like damage equivalent workouts or like like equivalent mileage where let's use that same example 10 by K at threshold one minute walk recovery. Compare that workout with just 10 K easy. They're about 10 kilometers of running. They count for 6.2 miles in your schedule. But that doesn't really, you know, intuitively we know you're going to be more sore and more tired after the workout. And intuitively we know that like, you know, if your calves are your Achilles, your knees been bothering you and yours is your first day back running, you don't start with the workout, you start with the easy day. There is some pretty cool biomechanics research on trying to calculate the mechanical load and compare it across workouts. So I think you will be able to generate for yourself at least an estimate of, okay, at marathon pace versus half marathon pace versus 10K, 5K, easy run pace, really easy shakeout pace. What's like an equivalent volume of running? And that'll look different than some of these training load metrics that people are using right now like trim or acute chronic workload or like training stress score because those are like physiologically based. I'm talking about like the injury risk biomechanical load training. So I think my guess is a couple years from now, we might know enough to actually have a reasonable conversation about that. That's more than than speculative. What's interesting though is that it's going to be individualized to the person because A, biomechanics, different person person, but also B, a lot of it actually has to do with your cadence and how your cadence changes as a functional speed. So that's what I'm looking forward to. I may need to rewrite the training plans if I find out that I got to rebalance the training load somehow. Yeah, that's fascinating stuff and on that note, what would you like to write next, John? Well, I mean, the obvious thing would be a half marathon book, right? And like that's, you know, that would be I will write one at some point. I kind of want to do something like different thematically. I have some ideas about a sort of like a visual guide to the science of running because I had a lot of fun putting together the graphs for the science section of an excellent. So something that's more like, you know, not just a bunch of, because I think, you know, I have a bunch of science books and like they're great, but you know, it's a chapter one adenosine triphosphate and equations and all this. It might be nice to have something that's almost like a coffee table book. Nice full color graphs. That's like, okay, what is LT one? What is LT two? What is view to max? What does it mean? Where's it come from? And like, can I see that visually? Something like that would be fun. But now I got, I got like 10 other book ideas that I got to write. So I got, I got my time, my work cut out for me. Well, John, thank you for writing this book. It's an excellent addition to any running resource library. I believe it's one of the best books written in the category and I'll be pulling it off the shelf for years to come. Where can people find your writing? Best way to find me and to follow me is at runningridings.com. I have a free email newsletter runningridings.com/news. If you want to get the book, that is at marathon excellence.com. John, thank you so much for sharing your time. It was a pleasure to speak with you. Yeah, thank you so much. It was great to be here.