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<< Weight Gain After Marathon changing stride length >>
 peak mileage before a marathon
Rickshaw
Runworks 2005 5M Racer
San Francisco, CA
Joined: 26 Nov 2004
Posts: 1157
peak mileage before a marathon Posted: Mon Dec 20, 2004 4:18 pm 
Among people I know and results I've seen, there seems to be a pretty strong correlation between peak weekly training mileage before a marathon, and marathon finish time. There still seems to be a lot of variability within that general trend, however-- one person might peak at a certain weekly mileage and then run a slow race, while another person with an identical background and weekly mileage might have a fast race. So I guess this is a convoluted way of asking whether increasing your weekly mileage is the best option for improving your marathon race times.

For the five marathons I've done, here's my peak weekly mileage, and the marathon time I ran afterwards. The peak mileage week was normally about 4 weeks before the race.

peak: 32 miles/week, time: 3:37
peak: 49 miles/week, time: 3:23
peak: 40 miles/week, time: 4:03
peak: 75 miles/week, time: 3:16
peak: 56 miles/week, time: 3:24
Rickshaw
Runworks 2005 5M Racer
San Francisco, CA
Joined: 26 Nov 2004
Posts: 1157
Re: peak mileage before a marathon Posted: Wed Dec 22, 2004 2:32 pm 
I'll be a nerd and partially answer my own question through a thread I found on the Running Times forums here: http://www.runningtimes.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=420

The general consensus there was that for most people, increasing average weekly mileage is definitely the first thing to look at when attempting to improve marathon times. One poster felt you can't even properly run a marathon on less than 60 to 70 miles per week!
Pithy Doug

Catskill Mountains of NY
Joined: 13 Dec 2004
Posts: 8
Re: peak mileage before a marathon Posted: Sun Dec 26, 2004 3:26 pm 
Rickshaw wrote:
Among people I know and results I've seen, there seems to be a pretty strong correlation between peak weekly training mileage before a marathon, and marathon finish time. There still seems to be a lot of variability within that general trend, however-- one person might peak at a certain weekly mileage and then run a slow race, while another person with an identical background and weekly mileage might have a fast race. So I guess this is a convoluted way of asking whether increasing your weekly mileage is the best option for improving your marathon race times.



Simple mileage is weak indicator. It's the quality of the miles. If you train 100 miles a week on a flat rail trail and run Pike's peak, you will not do well. The object is to have two to three quality workouts per week. How many QDs , as always, is proportional to the runner. A quality day can be two miles for a beginner to two a days for the experienced. Log books are great but don't become a slave to writing bigger numbers.
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