JT, Mistress of Races Like A Girl, posted or twittered three things today that share a theme.
First, she noted that Joan Benoit won the Oklahoma City Memorial Half-Marathon in 1:21:57.
Second, she linked to a Running Times interview of Greg McMillan by Scott Douglas on the issue of training for Masters.
Third, she linked to a typically fine LetsRun “The Week That Was.”
Separately, Robert of Cowboy Hazel twittered with a link about a “Nike coach [who] says that 2 marathons in a month are okay, but one has to be slow,” to which I asked “What’s the point.”
In the LetsRun piece, there’s the following about Kara Goucher’s apparently brief consideration of running London six days after Boston:
Should Kara Goucher Have Run London?
LetsRun.com has few official corporate policies. One rule, however, that may be our 1st formally adopted rule is advice we always give first-time marathoners and even gave to Paula Radcliffe after her first one: “Marathons take a lot of time to recover from.” As a result, we think it’s really risky to try do more than two per year (and we’re glad to see Ryan Hall has officially adopted this as his rule as well – although we actually okayed his decision to run London last year). As a result, some might find be surprised that we were actually fascinated by the talk that Kara Goucher was considering running London just 6 days after her “jog” in Boston. Normally, we’d vilify someone for this idea but once we thought about it, we said, “She should do it.”
It would wreck her body no doubt. However, Goucher isn’t probably going to race for another two years as she wants to have a baby, so who cares if her body is temporarily wrecked running-wise? She has plenty of time to recover for her next race.
That being said, there is the belief that a super-humanesque “I’m gonna totally destroy my body” type effort is something that one never recovers from, so maybe it’s just as well that she didn’t do it. But in this day and age of big-time appearance fees, how cool would it have been if she just showed up at London and raced. We kind of wish she had done it but give her a Thumbs Up for even considering it.
Separately, Ryan Hall, the gentleman to the left with “HALL” on his bib, twittered after Boston, “Another early morning. Flying to LA for photo shoot. A day of pretendind to be an athlete. My legs are trashed! No running for 2 weeks.“
I was taught the one-day-a-mile rule, i.e., you don’t run hard after a marathon until 26.21875 days after. In 2006, I ran a 5K 28 days after, but passed on a five-miler (I swore I’d go easy but knew I wouldn’t) two weeks out.
In the McMillan interview, he distinguishes among folks who start running when they are masters, those who ran when young and kind of fell out of it until they started up again when they were masters, and elites who continued to compete into mastersdom. (As the BroJos say on LetsRun, “45-year-old Colleen De Reuck ended up leading at several points in the Boston race. She ended up in a well-deserved 8th. 8th in Boston at the age of 45. That is insane.”)
Finally, the Benoit HM time. Her 1:21:27 is unimpressive. In the OT marathon, she ran 2:49:08, a US 50+ record. But she has a PR of 2:21:21, well faster than mine. Yet my 50+ time is, albeit less than a minute, faster. She also ran 17 very competitive marathons before she was 40 and has an HM PR of 1:08:34, over a minute faster than mine; but I have an HM some 3 minutes faster as a 51 year old.
I love Joannie, and her two performances in 1984 — the Olympic Trials and the Olympics — are the stuff of legend. At her peak she raced one or two marathons a year. Which brings us to Cal Ripken. Years ago, the Wall Street Journal did an article that wondered whether Ripken’s consecutive game streak hurt his career. By comparing him to other players at the start and end of their careers, it was pretty clear that the streak did hurt him. He was an outstanding player, but he would have been better, assuming he developed at the same rate as his comparables, if he had taken days off now and then.
What does this mean? A marathon is hard. It takes a lot out of you. I use Joannie because she is about my age and I can compare the numbers. She didn’t run that many marathons, but she still slowed more than I have.
It seems to me that to perform well in the short term, one needs a long build-up to and recovery after a marathon, so that the notion of multiple marathons close to one another, while perhaps having value in one’s completion tally, is contrary to performing well in those. And among the runners I know, none does more than two a year.
In the long-run, moreover, it seems that lots of marathons take their toll.
A caveat. I should note that the women’s 50+ world best in the marathon is 2:31:05, by Tatyana Pozdniakova. (Joannie is number 4 on the list.) But Pozdniakova’s (and the age-group’s) second and third fastest times were set one month apart. The male record in 2:19:29, by South African Titus Mamabolo.)
Separately, JT noted that the More Marathon was canceled because of the warm weather. She ran that race last year, but it is not her target race in 2009. But, she writes,
I didn’t make the More 2009 Marathon my goal marathon for this year. What a colossal disappointment that would have been. The fact that we can have a severe heat wave in late April convinces me that I need to select and register for a backup race every season.
Not bad advice. Chicago in 2007, New York in 1984 (when I DNFed because of the heat and planned to run Baltimore six weeks later but got injured in the interim), Boston in 1976.
And here’s Joannie in 2008:
6 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 29, 2009 at 9:51 pm
Daily News About Oklahoma City Marathon : A few links about Oklahoma City Marathon - Wednesday, 29 April 2009 19:51
[...] Joan Benoit and Cal Ripken « RunWestchester [...]
April 30, 2009 at 6:52 am
threlkeld
Nice selection of links (wink wink) and analysis of Benoit vs. Ripken (although, I have to say I have no idea who Cal Ripken is, not being a baseball(?) fan of any sports other than running and soccer.
I was pretty horrified when Goucher was making noises about running London. I saw it as, more than anything, a sign of immaturity — as a marathon runner and as a person. I’m glad that someone, presumably Salazar, talked her out of it.
While I agree that two marathons, spread out by about six months, is the maximum a competitive runner should expect to race well, I did make an interesting discovery last year. About 4-5 weeks after my spring marathon I went out and blasted to new PRs at all distances in a half marathon.
So I think I good recovery, with a little bit of fast running toward the very end, could yield a big PR at the half distance for some people. I’d love to try that again this year, but in late June/early July it will be too hot to bother.
It’s too late to choose a backup for Newport, but I will be registering for the January, 2010 Houston Marathon as a backup for the December, 2009 California International Marathon.
May 1, 2009 at 8:19 pm
Robert James Reese
Wow, there’s so much in here, I don’t know where to begin. I guess I’ll start with Cal Ripken. Sure, his stats probably suffered a bit because of his amazing streak, but it was the streak itself that came to define him as a player. Fifty years from now, people will still talk about the Iron Man, but most will not remember all the other third basemen playing at the same time as him, even if the ones who were better than him.
You can take that same though and apply it to marathoning — Sure, if you run a lot of marathons, it might slow you down late in your career, but is being fast the only point in running? We’ve had this discussion before, so I won’t rehash the whole thing here, but I’d like to repeat my belief that you should be out there running whatever’s fun for you. If that’s two marathons a year, great. If it’s ten, great.
I think a lot of it depends on the individual athlete’s recovery time too. Last year, I ran a 5 mile race four days after my first marathon and it was, by far, the best race I had ever run up to that point. I shaved a few minutes off my P.R. and felt no lingering fatigue from the marathon at all. Again, I’m certainly not running as fast as Hall or Kara (or even you), but I know what has worked for me in recovery…
Finally, I think the idea of a backup or “rain-check” marathon is a great idea.
May 6, 2009 at 8:18 pm
Keeping track « Echers: A girl and her blog
[...] just read this post that mentions the “one-day-a-mile rule, i.e., you don’t run hard after a marathon until [...]
May 15, 2009 at 12:31 am
Brenn
Interesting essay.
Regarding the WSJ article and your race times v. Joannie in the 50+ age bracket, there seem to be two different issues at play: performance over an entire career versus performance beyond the athlete’s prime years.
Ripken was consistent well past the 27-28 year old statistical peak for baseball players. And even after the streak, he put together good numbers, hitting .340 at the age of 38. My guess is the WSJ said that his glory days, statistically, could have been more glorious had he rested.
A counterpont on the diamond is Ricky Henderson, who wasn’t afraid to take a day off every now and then or to refer to himself in the third person, but who hit .315 (admittedly, an aberration) on the Mets at the age of 40 and stole 25 bases at the age of 42.
Getting back to the running, your piece suggests that Wanjiru and Hall are
doing harm to their 50-year-old future selves, but if they are not doing harm to their peak performance years (which, with a marathon, seems a moving target these days), then I’m sure it’s a trade they’d make, and that Joannie too wouldn’t regret.
Quantifying how rest helps a runner seems a real trick, both with regards to how many marathons one should run in a year and how many days one should run in a week.
May 16, 2009 at 6:43 pm
joegarland
In the Greg McMillan interview, he says there are two main types of Masters runners, those who start late and those who started early, got away from it, and got back into it. He says a third category, the young elite, is much rarer. I don’t think elites should lessen their racing to “save” themselves for later. My point with respect to Joanie is that she provides a ready comparison — PRs, number of races — to myself. But neither she nor the other elites were/are doing more than three marathons a year, and generally two. (It can get dicey in an Olympic year when there can be a nice NY or Chicago payday not too far after the Games.) It just struck me that even that would lessen one’s performance later on. Which probably doesn’t matter to them, and probably wouldn’t have mattered to me had I been of a mind to do them with any frequency. Even now the prospect of two a year — not entirely attractive given the dedication required and the ensuing spending the whole year training for or recovering from one marathon or another — was quashed by my wife’s insisting that it wasn’t going to happen.
McMIllan’s is an interesting interview, and I should have noted that he thinks Masters runners of long duration have a reservoir of fitness that allows them to run fairly consistently fairly often, which I interpret to mean the shorter (HM and less) stuff.
I agree that the recovery factor is runner-specific. I seem to recover quickly, but those who contribute to the weekly Masters running thread on LetsRun tend to require more rest/recovery days than I do. I think recovery pace also varies runner to runner.
It was a while ago that I read it, but my recollection re Cal Ripken was to compare his later years against the later years of guys who put up comparable numbers when they were the same, younger ages.