By Alan Lawn
(He/him)

So I’ve had more time to think things over, and I’ve got a train ride ahead of me. I figured I’d jot down some more fully formed thoughts about where I went wrong in my training.

Before I get into it, I should note that it’s become increasingly clear to me, from talking to other runners and seeing how they operate, that people are different when it comes to ideal training, racing, and recovery. There are some general principles that apply across the board, but there are all sorts of questions where no consensus has emerged despite decades of increasingly scientific practice by elites. Frank Shorter capped his long runs at 20 miles and says he aimed to finish his speedwork sessions feeling like if he had to do one more rep at pace, gun to head, he’d end up eating the bullet. Eliud Kipchoge runs up to 40K, including sometimes doubling on LR (long run) days, and says he never gives more than 80% of his total capacity at any given session. With that in mind, these are the four main lessons I’m taking away from my Boston training cycle.

LESSON ONE: No going to the well during tempo runs

In hindsight, I can pinpoint where my cycle went off the rails. The period from 8/23 through 9/5 is the strongest I’ve ever felt as a runner. I got my weekly mileage into the 80s with two workouts and quality in the long run. I finished the LRs feeling strong. One of my workouts was 4x2 miles with 2-minute jog recoveries, and I ran the last two a little faster than lactate threshold (LT) without redlining. Then I got greedy.

It was a little early to be peaking, I told myself, so I needed to do even more. The following Tuesday I ran 10x1000 harder than LT with 1-minute jog recoveries. Then, on Thursday, I tried to run 3x3 miles at HMP (half-marathon pace) cutting down to LT or faster on the last rep. I should not have finished that rep. I struggled to hit HMP, I faded despite putting forth a race-level effort, and a witness says I had quite the hitch in my giddy up, though nothing felt off at the time.

That’s just not where you want to be when you’ve got a LR two days later and another two big weeks before your taper. It was a peak-week workout when if anything I should have considered taking a cutback week (which would have been my only one of my abbreviated buildup). At the very least, I should have dialed back my Tuesday workout before attempting such a monster session.

I think there’s a case to be made for taking the Shorter approach to, well, shorter speedwork sessions, at least on occasion, because a hard 400 or even 800 isn’t long enough to do serious structural damage. Tempos are a different story. I basically ran an all-out 5K on wrecked legs.

LESSON TWO: If you’ve dug too deep, stop digging

Although I felt okay afterwards, that third rep was a red flag. It was the first time during the block my body had raised the white flag, and I knew my form had been compromised. I should have immediately backed off a bit, but again stubbornness and greed prevailed. I returned to the well that Saturday, grinding out a 3-mile fast finish at the end of my LR.

After that, I never felt great again. I developed overuse issues in my glute and hip. Every single run was a grind or worse. I had crossed that red line from damaged (in the good, precursor-to-supercompensation sense) to broken (though I was not acutely injured), such that even an aggressive taper was insufficient to fix me. At Boston, my legs felt bad from the start.

You may be wondering what I was thinking. That makes two of us. I think a couple things were going on. First, I was looking at each run in isolation. A 3-mile fast finish in itself is no big deal, but it is when you overdid it two days before. Second, I had convinced myself that I wanted to take a high-risk, high-reward approach in pursuit of a PR (personal record). So, the standard good advice to take three days off – an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure – rang hollow.

Accordingly, I kept at it, hoping I’d strike gold and recover without any significant cutback. Nope. I ended up eventually taking a rest day, and then a more substantial taper, after I found myself limping during a cooldown. Too little, too late.

LESSON THREE: Don’t get carried away with long runs

There are two rules of thumb I’ve repeatedly come across that make sense to me: (i) don’t ever run for longer than you expect your goal marathon to take; and, (ii) cap your long run at 30% of your weekly mileage. But it’s still possible to overdo it within these constraints, because LRs are so taxing. I’ve read that once you go past 90 minutes, and especially once you’ve burned through your glycogen stores (roughly two hours), the marginal physiological cost of running goes way up (unless you’re going at a recovery/ultra-pace, which is too slow for marathon training purposes). There are real marginal benefits as well, but what’s most important to marathon success is total volume and consistency. This is why Frank “Longer Is Overrated” Shorter never went further than 20 – he didn’t want to risk having to cut back one of his other days, resulting in a net loss of mileage and maybe also a worse workout.

I suspect I ran afoul of this lesson as well. There were three weeks in a row when I went longer than 22 miles, and on one of those days I tacked on a 1.5-mile “cooldown” to get home. What if instead of some of those super-taxing later miles I had turned a couple of my easy days into medium-long runs?

LESSON FOUR: Have an honest conversation with yourself about risks and rewards

I feel like this comes down to: (i) really thinking through and visualizing the various training and race-day scenarios; and, (ii) being realistic about the probabilities. I have often found myself thinking and saying things like, “all I care about is a PR! I’d rather have a 5% chance of PR-ing and a 95% chance of blowing up than a guaranteed solid day.” But I’m not sure I always actually believed them. Blowing up sucks! Finishing strong is great! And what if it’s really just a 1% shot at a PR?

Moreover, a do-or-die mentality can encourage death in training, as it did in my Boston build. I’m okay with the approach I took on race day—it didn’t seem out of the question that my legs would hold up, and it was exciting to be in race mode—but I really wish I had been more conservative during training. Never again will I seriously risk showing up at the start line injured or beat up.

Happy to hear any thoughts, and thanks for reading!

Editor’s Note: A version of this text was originally posted on Strava

Text by: Alan Lawn
Photos: As noted
Edited by: Linda S. Chan (she/her)
Produced by: Linda S. Chan

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Boston Lessons

By Alan Lawn(He/him)

By Alan Lawn
(He/him)