An Inside Look – Training for the 2017 Boston Marathon, Part 3

24-mile route from early-AM March 12th. I can’t recall a colder day – Image (c) 2017 all rights reserved

By Chris Kovalchick

And we are back! While (hopefully) all of you were sitting at Town Meeting with me last week exercising your civic duty, I was additionally enjoying the fulfillment of reaching the peak of my training for the Boston Marathon. While the ultimate fulfillment will come with a successful race, it is always satisfying to complete the core of my training with no major setbacks and a positive feeling of where I am at fitness-wise. In the past months, I have taken you through the first two phases of my training: the base-building phase and the speed phase. Now we’ll have a look at the strength phase – a 4-week sequence which culminated with a 24-mile run on the marathon course on March 25^th, roughly 3 weeks prior to race day.

Now that I have built up a good base of mileage and incorporated hard workouts designed to build my speed, the goal of this phase is to really push the envelope in terms of what my body can handle. In my experience, if you are aiming to race a marathon and race it hard, you must push yourself to the limit in this phase, which is the fine line of training as hard as possible without overtraining and becoming injured. I have certainly been on both sides of that line. It is devastating to come down with an injury within the 4-8 week timeframe prior to a marathon (which is what I did in 2016), but it is equally if not more devastating to have a bad race and know there was more you could have done to put yourself in a position to race at full throttle. Dialing in my goal marathon pace is a key focus point of this phase, particularly towards the end of long runs when my legs are the most fatigued. A large part of executing on race day is simulating the feeling of the ups and downs in training runs. If you don’t know how to physically and mentally handle a rough patch during a long training run, you certainly won’t know how to do so when it counts in the actual race.

There are four essential elements that I incorporate during this cycle: sustained high mileage (95-100 miles per week), tempo or threshold workouts targeted at my half-marathon pace (in preparation for the New Bedford Half Marathon which I ran on March 19^th), extended goal-marathon-pace workouts (8-10 miles at target race pace), and course simulator long runs of 22-24 miles with a section of miles near the end of those runs holding goal-marathon-pace. I cannot overemphasize how crucial it is to be running these long runs on terrain which simulates the elevation profile of the Boston Marathon route (or in general for other marathons, running your long runs on terrain representative of the marathon course you will run). It is the only way to mimic the type and sequence of fatigue you will undergo on race day.

In the table below, I detail these essential elements for the 4 weeks of the strength phase. You will note that I had one hiccup in the first week – a stomach bug which was inconveniently passed onto me by the little one from his colleagues at daycare. Unfortunately, while the bug only knocked me out for two days, it was not an optimal two days as it made the weekend a wash. I don’t usually take days off, but when you are up all night with such an ailment it’s a bit hard to head out for a 22 miler.

One run that I will specifically remember from this training run is the 24-miler on March 12^th. Recall that this was the frigid weekend with morning temperatures in the single digits. On this morning when I departed via my town center route (adding Lincoln this time), it was -8F with the wind chill. My handheld bottle filled with Gatorade was frozen solid by mile 12, at which point I stashed it alongside the road in Concord and retrieved it later in the day. Runs like these require a great deal of mental resolve but are the runs upon which the most memorable Boston Marathon training cycles are built.

An interesting question I receive quite a bit is why my peak goal-marathon-pace run is 10 miles and not longer. In other sports, you practice performing the same length that you do during the game or match. In fact, it is not unusual in several team sports to take many more swings, shots and throws in practice than one will in the game. This is not the right approach when it comes to distance running. The goal of the training cycle is to peak on the actual day of the marathon, and not before. Since the act of running 26.2 miles continuously at one time is such a taxing event (many experts will tell you it takes about 4 weeks for your body to fully recover from running a marathon), doing so prior to your race would prevent you from racing optimally when it counts. In fact, one might surmise that you would run worse in a marathon having run 26.2 miles at goal race pace three weeks prior to the race than if you never ran any miles at goal race pace. There is a large difference between running the majority of a long run at an easier pace with a portion of the run at your goal marathon pace and running the entire long run at your goal marathon pace.

In the third week of this block, I laced up my racing shoes for the New Bedford Half Marathon on Sunday, March 19^th. As I mentioned in the last article, this race brings out the finest runners in New England. Since the race is 4 weeks prior to the Boston Marathon, many people are in peak training mode and head down to the south coast of Massachusetts ready to throw down some fine times. I was targeting to run the race around a 5:30/mile pace, which would put me in with a finishing time in the low 1:13’s. I was fortunate to be able to run the race in a pack of several runners from the Greater Boston Track Club and the Boston Athletic Association, one of which was my good friend and soft tissue specialist Ian Nurse of Wellness in Motion Boston. It was a good thing too because the wind gusts that day were anywhere between 35-54 MPH according to the National Weather Service. I’ve run in windy races before and certainly expect a strong wind out of the north on this course, particularly when making the turn at mile 9 onto the harbor. However, the wind on this day was a stand-you-up wind like I have never experienced before.

My mile splits from the New Bedford Half Marathon on 3/19/17. Can you tell when the 50 mph wind gusts showed up?

After a rough first two miles into the wind, we settled in nicely and for a 10-kilometer stretch from miles 3-9, I was feeling very smooth. We then turned north again and the pace came to a screeching halt (or at least it felt like it). In an instant, we dropped 30 seconds a mile in pace. I knew at that point that hitting my target time was going to be a long shot, but in the spirit of using the race as a tune-up for Boston, I was pleased to be able to go hard right until the end. My finishing time of a 1:14:39 was indeed a 12-second personal best at the distance. It was a bit disappointing given the shape I am in, but all in all, I am pleased with where I am leading into Patriots Day. My previous personal best at the distance was at this exact race in 2014 (or as my wife likes to point out, 10,000 miles ago).

Now that I’m through this phase, I’m onto the final 3-week phase – the taper. I’ll be back late next week with a review of taper and a preview of race-day. In the meantime, it’s time to start getting excited because Marathon Monday is less than 2 weeks away!

Chris Kovalchick, who credits the hallowed training grounds of Bedford as a key cog in his running routine, serves on the Bedford Trails Committee and is a Land Steward for the O’Connor Conservation Area.