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What went wrong during my Marathon?
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A bit more information:
To run a 4hr marathon means an average pace just over 5:40 per km (i guess many people on this forum look at it in miles per hour so I am just making the comparison for you).
Most of my longer training runs ended up being slower than this, around 5.50per km to 6:00 per km (but difficult to say as my long runs often included some more hills than marathon day).
At the halfway point on marathon day I was averaging around 5:20 per km. When struggling to the end I was ending up in the 7 minute range.
So in a way I was doing my training runs more slowly (and in the scheme of things a 4 hour marathon isnt exactly supersonic anyhow). Yet most comments are that I have been setting off too fast.
Ultimately, what do you guys suggest for my training? Would it be better to do some long training runs even more slowly than 5:50 per km? Or simply better to do my long training runs around 5:40pm and stick to this on marathon day?
KL11 and Maxpower North West. My doctor told me I probably had IBS and should try living a less stressful lifestyle.... which is like asking someone only to breathe every other day... it actually turned out I was gluten intolerant. Having fixed that, it's made a world of difference to stomach cramps and the need to take an explosive crap at random points in time, which inevitably also included running training. All fixed now. Might be worth looking at.
KL11 - recommend you read a book on marathon training. The impressively titled "Advanced Marathoning" by Pfitzinger & Davis is highly recommended. As I said in my last post, training for a marathon is a mixed menu, not a singular diet. Running slow increases the body's ability to provide 'slow-energy' from fat sources, reducing your reliance on 'fast-energy' from glycogen stores (blood sugars - the stuff that carbo-loading is intended to enhance the supply of).
Running fast increases efficiency, so you get more propulsion for the same energy expenditure. Lactic acid is the byproduct of oxygen and glycogen burn. Hard running (lactate threshold) is not to increase the body's ability to handle large quantities of lactate (that would mean large amounts of glycogen burn and quickly diminishing supplies of fast energy = race tiredness). The idea is to make the body capable of going faster without burning more energy to do so. The driving equivalent would be going faster by increasing aerodynamic efficiency, rather than putting the foot down further on an accelerator.
Increasing lactate efficiency and increasin fat-burning effectiveness are at opposite ends of the training spectrum. You need different kinds of running to achieve the adaptations you desire. There's not one specific heart rate zone that does it all, or has a singular effect. So read up and grow in understanding and don't look for simplistic X+Y = Z type answers. You won't get one that's worth relying on.
Same for the diet stuff. Nausea and hyperthermic reactions can happen due to the body struggling to cope switching between energy supplies (fat and glycogen). Often at the end of a marathon I shake severely as glycogen goes low. If I try and put fast sugars in an empty stomach it can be overwhelming and make me want to wretch. But you have to EXPERIMENT with foods to get what works well with your chemistry. Don't look for formulas that work for other people bur garner some ideas and try out different possibilities. Every long run is a chance to learn about nutrition and fuelling.
KL- did you try to do any shorter races before the marathon to establish if your 4h target was realistic? Any 10k/ half marathons? I think it would be a good starting point next time.
I don't personally think that doing your long runs at 5:50-6min/ km was too slow if you were aiming for 4h (assuming that your target was realistic). Averaging 5:20 at the half way point however was way too fast.
If I might draw an analogy - it is a little bit
"I walked round the house in the dark and hit my knee on furniture and it hurts. Why does it hurt? "
The explanation of nerves, inflammation, etc etc will not be very useful. But "Turn the light on and arrange the furniture so that there's space between you can walk through" is a time-honoured prevention strategy, even though the details of where you put your sofa depend on how big it, and your house, are...
So by not answering your question directly we mean well.
There are loads of ongoing studies into why people feel sick when it all goes wrong in races. However, the evidence is pretty sound that if you do a few simple things that you're much less likely to get sick!
These things are:
1) carboload adequately before the race to get as much glycogen stored up as you can. This means eating 10-12g of carbohydrate per kg of bodyweight for the 3 days prior to the marathon. How you best get that carbohydrate differs between people - for example someone who is affected badly by gluten might eat lots of rice and potatoes rather than bread and pasta
2) Have race-practice runs where you go at the pace you plan for the race, for say 15km, wearing the clothes and shoes you plan to in the race, at the time of day of the race, on the same terrain as the race, trying out the food and drink you plan to have in the race, in the same quantity and frequency as planned. This way you can find out ahead of time if particular food or drink does not agree with you, and try something different in your next race practice run
3) Run the race at even pace or slightly increasing pace. If this is how Paula Radcliffe (PB 2:15) and me (PB 3:59) ran our best races and how the experts advise runners to pace themselves then it might just be the way to go, mightn't it?
The science behind pacing that way - basically - is that at faster speeds we burn more glycogen per km - it takes the same energy more or less to move a km however fast we go, but more of that energy comes from glycogen and less from fat. It takes a lot more oxygen to get X amount of energy from fat than it does from glycogen, so when you run low on glycogen you breath harder and run slower.
Now the body has a limited supply of glycogen (that hopefully you maximize by carboloading, see (1)) and you can top up a little by taking in carbs during the race (see (2)).
But the faster you go the quicker the glycogen runs out.
A good analogy is having a tank of petrol that's 1/4 full. The quickest way to get to the petrol station to refill is NOT to go as fast as you can, because you use more petrol at 100 km/h and run out before you get there, and then have to push the car the rest of the way! The fastest way is to drive at an easy moderate speed which keeps the fuel consumption low enough so that you still have a teaspoon when you get to the gas station
Think of glycogen as petrol and "pushing the car" as having to burn mostly fat...