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Hogeye Marathon Review

Date Created: 2023-05-24

Things did not go as I hoped they would, but I am also not too surprised about that. Here are a few notes I made in my training journal during the lead up to this race:

My current guess is that I'll be able to run my marathon at a pace that produces somewhere around 2-2.5 mmol/L. Maybe that's too aggressive, but I'll keep running my workouts and extending time at MP and see how I feel.

2/12/2023

Looking back at the past few weeks of MP workouts, it looks like when I'm feeling fresh, EF is usually much higher, around 1.75. And my HR in miles 2 and 4 was actually closer to what I see during Tempo intervals.

When I've been feeling fatigued on other MP workouts, EF is usually around 1.70 So seeing the most of these down around 1.60 is definitely low, but this feels like a situation where I shouldn't get caught up on the results of one workout. I've done some good workouts over the past 7-10 days and I'm building up some fatigue in my legs. An EF drop from 1.75 to 1.60 is an 8.6% decline. Although I expect to see my performance decrease during periods of higher density of workouts in my trianing, this is getting close to what I feel would be too much.

When I was first looking at this tonight, I did my math wrong and thought it was a 5% decline, and I wrote that 10% would probably be too much. So now I corrected the math and 8.6% is pretty close to 10%. But I actually have no idea how much is too much, because this is really the first training cycle I'm tracking my HR and EF all the time. So for now I'll just note it and see how things turn out.

3/29/2023

Felt better today than yesterday while warming up. Tempo interval was slower than I was expecting and HR higher. My data haven't been looking great the past week to 10 days or so. But there's nothing I can do about it to change anything before the marathon now. Just keep to my taper plan and try to reduce work stress as much as possible.

4/5/2023

I felt flat and generally not great. Getting worried I put myself into a hole that a taper alone will not pull me out of. I also spent quite a bit of the day in front of my computer, so maybe that had an effect. Possibly poor nutrition status. I don't know anything.

4/7/2023

HR was yet again higher than I expected during warmup. I'm thinking maybe my expectations are anchored to times when I've been fatigued enough to actually repress my HR. Ran the first 1.5 miles of each rep by feel, then the last 0.5 miles had my watch alert me if I was below my goal pace. Each time I had to speed up just a little to get down to pace.

4/8/2023

There was ample evidence pointing towards needing to adjust my expectations for this marathon, but I have a bias towards optimism and reframing tough days and workouts in a positive light. I tend to lean towards aggressive goals and not wanting to put limits on myself. This has resulted in some races that go great and I even surprise myself a bit, and other races that I blow up spectacularly and some in between. I'd say overall I've had successful races about 25% of the time. I hope to be able to use my training journal to start learning how to better set myself up for success. I still will probably set aggressive goals, but maybe I can raise my success rate to 50-75%.

Possible Lessons