Ealing Eagles marathon night

Last night I attended a marathon night arranged by my running club, the Ealing Eagles. The night featured 7 runners from the club and a guest speaker, all talking about their wide-ranging marathon experiences and offering tips.

As someone training for my 4^th marathon, I was a bit worried it would be too beginner friendly, but I had stressed unnecessarily. There was some useful advice there for everyone – from absolute beginner to hardened marathoners looking for fast times. I don’t fall into either of those categories but am desperate to run a faster marathon (my current PB is 4:19) and at the end of the night felt I had 3 or 4 bits of key information to take away and try in my marathon preparation.

There were quite a few controversial topics across the speakers. The distance of the long run was a recurring topic, with a couple of the speakers presenting a good case for a 22/23 mile run in the training programme. Overwhelming the consensus was that you needed to hit the 20 mile mark in training, for psychological and physical reasons.

I did find guest speaker Dan Afsar’s statistics on 20 mile races in training really useful, as I had been considering the Finchley 20. With data showing that a good 20 mile race can negatively affect your training programme and your marathon time, it provided food for thought. Dan stressed that it’s important not to go all out if doing a 20 mile race as part of your training so, knowing my inability to restrain myself in race mode, I think I’ll stick to the Reading half marathon now!

Dan’s presentation also revealed to me just how wrong I got my 2012 London marathon race strategy so I’ll be making some real changes to my behaviour on race day to see it makes any difference to my finish time in 2013. I loved the advice about making a marathon a 20 mile run followed by a 10k race and am looking forward to trying to put that into practice.

There was also a lot of useful information about speedwork. My primary New Year’s resolution is to attend intervals sessions every week with the Eagles and last night reiterated the importance of sticking to this resolution if I’m going to get faster. I also noted the advice from fellow Eagle Yan that trying to keep up with faster runners at the club can dramatically improve your race times. I think I might have to make that another resolution for 2013.

The main points I’ll take out of the night and put into practice are:

·         Make one of my long runs a 22 miler

·         Do an intervals/speedwork session every week

·         Train at race pace (for this I am going to have to invest in a Garmin, but it will be worth it). I’ll do this in kilometres, as Yan pointed out it’s easier to correct your pace using kilometre units.

·         And finally, run more with the Eagles (especially those a bit faster than me!)