I have had the pleasure of coaching a stellar group of athletes for Manchester Half 2023; we’re now less than two weeks away and the standard paranoia is starting to creep in for some of them.
So lets go through some key items – there’s plenty of other writing on all of these subjects, so I’ll keep it concise and just put in my favourite points for athletes looking to get a PB.
But first…
To My Athletes
I know some of you are worried that I have a time in mind that you should achieve and that I’ll be disappointed in you if you don’t manage it. Well, you’re part right; as your coach I have a range of times that I think you could manage (see A, B and C goals later) and I’ll share those with you individually, but I genuinely do not give a tinker’s cuss what time you end up achieving.
I care that you signed up to do this training in the first place; I warned you that it would be a challenge but you stepped up anyway and for that I’m proud of you.
I care that you have listened to my advice and recovered when I told you to but put in the really hard work when you needed to and for that I’m immensely proud of you.
And finally, I care that when the race is over and you look back that you can say; “I’m proud of what I did”. Whether that’s a new PB, whether that’s putting in everything you have on race day but it not quite being enough for a new PB, whether that’s simply finishing despite everything going wrong, whether that’s making a brave decision to stop to protect an injury knowing that you can train again or whether that’s giving up a potential new PB because someone is struggling and you need to help them to the finish – I will be happy if you make yourselves proud on race day.
The Taper
You’re going to gain a huge amount of ‘freshness’ in the taper and it is virtually impossible to make any measurable fitness gains in the last two weeks from any given workout. Therefore it is almost impossible to do to little in the taper weeks but very easy to do too much.
It should be ten to fourteen days; the first week should be approximately 80% of your maximum volume and the second week should be 50-60% of your maximum volume.
The way to implement this is to look at your week’s training 3 or 4 weeks out from race day (this is likely to be your hardest week of training) and more or less copy each day’s workouts in the first taper week, but cut the amount of time in each workout down by about 80% (less at the beginning of the week, more at the end), so the intensity should be about the same, but there should be less time in each workout.
The final week before the race should follow the same pattern but at about 50-60% – however, if that doesn’t result in at least one set that has 3 or 4 times 1-2 minutes at race pace then replace one of the interval workouts with a workout that matches that pattern. This is important for race day!
During the taper, spend time checking the race pack to make sure you know what you need to do on race day and have all your kit. DO NOT fill the extra time you get from training less with those heavy physical tasks you’ve been putting off! Do spend some time visualising what a good race will feel like – get ready for some discomfort but get comfortable with that thought.
The Warm-Up
I’m quite a fan of the ‘standard’ RAMP style workout…
Raise – start with some walking then move on to a light jog in order to raise your heartrate – 5 to 15 minutes
Activate and Mobilise – incorporate some drills; straight legged running, A-Skips, B-Skips (if its on a rough surface or has tight turns then add in some side stepping and Carioca). If you have any particular tight spots then do some exercises to mobilise those joints – 5 to 10 minutes.
Potentiate – Get your physiological and psychological systems up to the level they need to be at to start the race – this could be some strides or this could be a few minutes (max 5) at race pace with some recovery between each stride. Max 5 minutes.
This gives a range from 15 to 30 minutes – the faster your race pace is the longer you will need. I wouldn’t give a hard and fast rule for how long but I would suggest if your race is above your threshold pace (generally the hardest pace you could possibly run for about an hour) then you should be at the 30 minute end and if your race is getting down towards your ‘chatty pace’ then you can go down as low as 15 minutes, in fact if you’re doing ultra then you can probably skip the ‘potentiate’ phase entirely…
The Goals
For an experienced athlete, setting a race target is generally straightforward enough; they will know what times they’ve done before, what their fitness is currently like and, sometimes with a little guidance from a coach, can guess within a couple of minutes what they can do on race day.
Having said that, even an experienced runner knows that there are (at least) three likely goals to have in mind;
A) an ‘I’m feeling great’ time – that you could do on a perfect day – where not just the conditions are in your favour and nothing goes wrong, but where you do your warm-up and you just know that everything feels right and you have loads of energy and everything is moving exactly as it should.
B) an ‘OK day’ time – a pace which you should achieve if nothing actually goes wrong (weather ok, no illness or niggles) – but during the warm-up everything just feels ‘meh’.
C) a ‘get it done’ time – a pace which you think you should achieve even if a handful of things don’t quite go your way, maybe your stomach is off, maybe the weather is awful etc.
And how do you set the times without a recent Half Marathon performance? I would suggest using a number of data points:
A recent 10km race (or hard effort) – double that time and add 10%
A Cooper test (max effort for 12 minutes) then take that distance and calculate 201.26 – ( 0.03433 x [distance covered in meters] ) [1]
Looking at some long fast interval efforts (5 to 10 minutes) that you’ve done in your training and thinking how long you could maintain it for. The whole distance? Half the distance? Then scale a little bit up or down to give you a feel for a target.
The Race
Hopefully you’ve done your warm-up and have a sense as to whether its an A-Goal, B-Goal or C-Goal kind of day.
If you are lucky then you will be able to find a pacer within a minute or two of your target time and stay with them – but do keep an eye on the km splits because even the best pacers can have an off day!
If you’re pacing it yourself then this is where your ‘race pace’ taper workout(s) should pay dividends; with a mass start race you’re going to struggle to safely look down at your watch every couple of hundred meters. Which means you will need to run your race pace by feel for a km or two, i.e. do I feel like my cadence is right, like I’m moving over the ground in the right way and does my heart rate and breathing feel like it did during the early parts of the intervals I did in taper week. Once it is safe to do so keep an eye on the average pace on your watch, ideally it should be 2-3 seconds slower than target for the first half of the race and 2-3 seconds faster than target for the last half (on a flat course!)
If your watch has race pacing features, either a simple ‘finish time estimate’ or Garmin’s PacePro, then make use of them BUT make sure you’ve practiced with them before race day. Start thinking about what data you want to see on your watch and get it set-up during the taper so you can do a couple of easy runs practicing checking the fields you’re really interested in.
Then settle in and race, get uncomfortable for a while – hopefully you can get comfortable later celebrating with a shiny medal and a new PB (and if not there’s always next time – after all, you love the training as much as you love the racing!)
Citations
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6848386/ Alvero-Cruz JR, Carnero EA, Giráldez García MA, Alacid F, Rosemann T, Nikolaidis PT, Knechtle B. Cooper Test Provides Better Half-Marathon Performance Prediction in Recreational Runners Than Laboratory Tests. Front Physiol. 2019 Nov 5;10:1349. doi: 10.3389/fphys.2019.01349. PMID: 31749711; PMCID: PMC6848386.
Coach Alex Masidlover 