LSR pace for a 3.15 marathon

greenplain

Hi,

I will be running my 6th marathon in Kildare in May. I want to try and go sub 3.15. I will be following the pfitz 18/55 plan.

My question is what pace should i be doing my LSR's at ?

Recent Background :

Waterford Marathon July 2012 : 3.20 finish, used the pfitz 18/55 plan. My pace for the LSR's was 9 minute miles

Clonakilty Marathon December 2012 : 3.26 finish,used the pfitz 18/55 plan. My pace for the LSR's was 9 minute miles

Q7

I'd say 9 minute miles are a bit too slow for LSR to get sub 3:15. I'd say you'd want to be comfortable doing your long run at about 8:15 to reach your target.
Have a look at McMillan Running Calculator http://www.mcmillanrunning.com - it gives LSR pacing for race times.

ThePiedPiper

Greenplain, in the last couple of years my plan would be something like this for the 8 weeks coming up to marathon:

Week 1: 18 miles total at PMP + 1 minute
Week 2: 20 miles at PMP + 1 minute
Week 3: 23 miles total, with maybe 3 at PMP, the rest at PMP + 1 minte
Week 4: 17/18 with about 8 at PMP, the rest at PMP + 45 seconds or else race a half marathon at full effort
Week 5: 20/21 with 8 at PMP, the rest at PMP+40 seconds
Week 6: 20 with 12 miles at PMP, the rest at maybe PMP+ 40 seconds
Week 7: 20 at PMP+1 minute, maybe a few PMP at the tail end if you're feeling good
Week 8: 10-12 miles with about 8 of them in or around MP
Week 9: Marathon with 26.2 miles at PMP.

This is the type of schedule that has worked best for me. Bear in mind that the Long Run is only one aspect of successful marathon training, a very important session, but the midweek tempo session or interval session would be just as important.

ecoli

RunForestRun wrote: »

This is the type of schedule that has worked best for me. Bear in mind that the Long Run is only one aspect of successful marathon training, a very important session, but the midweek tempo session or interval session would be just as important.

Nailed it on the head

You should never look at any one session of a week in isolation (and similarly never any one week of a full plan)

How many quality sessions would you do a week (Tempos, hills,intervals)

How many days would you run a week?

What sort of mileage would you do?

How would you space your training) (i.e the layout as this can be imprortant)


If you are just doing easy to moderate pace the whole time I would suggest addressing the pace but can't really give an accurate assessment without some background info.

Personally in early stages of training my athletes I am not worried about long run pace because the way I set up training is to have them run a Saturday session followed by a long run sunday. This means that they are fatigued going into the run so time of the feet is working on endurance while also giving them sufficient recovery then on monday

Again it all depends on how you have your training set up. There are many ways to approach it and not always a right answer but you need to look at all the pieces of the puzzle.

rom

I run my long runs at 50bpm below my max HR. (just saying what works for me) but anyways for Dublin this was about 9min/mile which translated to 3:18 on the day (with 15+ LSRs) and now this has gone down to 8:20 or less. So using this my LSR gets naturally faster based on my progression rather than my race time goal.