In article said:I've got several 20s and a couple of 25 milers under my
belt but for psychological reasons if none other, I'd like
to do a long run closer to my actual race distance so my
leaning is towards a 28 miler.
Well you know what Doug said about opinions (-; I can't say
a whole lot about the physiological aspects of this since
I've never run further than 13.1 miles.
However, the psychological aspect deserves some comment. So
I'm going to ramble philosophically in a way that may or may
not be relevant. Actually, it probably won't be, but I feel
like rambling anyway.
We all desire to eliminate uncertainty in races. After all,
good preparation requires that one avoid relying on luck, or
as one runner put it, "train for good luck". So why rely on
chance when we can have certainty instead ? Making a good
performance certain is surely preferable to making a good
performance an accident. With this in mind, we try to
simulate race conditions in training, as much as possible,
so that racing conditions are familiar, and our responses to
those conditions are less uncertain.
But the problem with trying to duplicate the race in
training is that eventually, you get to the point where you
may as well just run the race. For example, if 28 miles,
then why not just do the extra 5k, for a race distance
training run ? But then, you could run it a bit faster, and
run a 50k race to prepare for your 50k race.
What I'm getting at in a roundabout way, is that races are
unavoidably experiments, and at some point, one must just
accept it an let it be that way. I was terrified of the fact
that uncertainty awaited me before my last half marathon,
the previous 4 miler made a good race a certainty, but all I
knew was that it would be somewhere in the 6:24-6:14 range.
Going in with a willingness to let it unfold and accept the
uncertainty proved a wise strategy -- I finished ahead of
team-mates who used out-of-date long race performances as a
basis for pacing (whereas I paced off a faster teammate).
Note that the moral here is about accepting uncertainty, not
that you should go out aggressively in a 50k (-;
The danger of pushing to eliminate all, or most of the
uncertainty is that the only way to do so is to run your
race, or most of it, in training, which could potentially
lead to "leaving your race on the training track".
Cheers,
--
Donovan Rebbechi pegasus.rutgers.edu~elflordOpen ↗
