Do I Need To Train at My Race Pace?

"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you."
- Rita Mae Brown

Hi guys. Been quite a while since I last blogged. Actually, it was around the time of my last trail race back at the Tranquility Lake 50k Race back in November. I'm fine, but I was pooped from a second year of the Southeastern Trail Series, and a big upturn in my work level as a Physical Therapist. That, and a big denial that I am slowing down at 67! Man, I hate that, but am accepting it better (honest, I am). Before the Tranquility Lake race, I felt I had repeated as the Grand Master Point Leader again, and resting on my laurels, decided to just run the 25K instead of the 50k (remember I said I was pooped). Well, that plan worked as well as Seattle throwing THAT pass in the Super Bowl...I wound up losing first place by 0.5 points. That was a kick in the butt. Oh well, just like Richard Wilson said after throwing THAT pass...oops!!! I kept running in December and January, though cut down a bit and felt like nothing exciting was going on for you guys to read in RWA, so my writing went into semi-hibernation. I say "semi" because for the past several months, leading up to the local (Birmingham, Al) Mercedes Marathon, I have been writing a weekly training blog "Training With Al". That race is in just 2 weeks, so TWA will soon go into hibernation, and now I'm ready to wake RWA up. As the my "race" season gets cranked up again, I'm sure things will pop up in my head that I'll put down on paper (hahaha, my 6 decade mind knows there's no paper, but "I'll put it down on screen" doesn't sound quite right).

I was running this morning on the Oak Mt trails by myself and feeling I was doing pretty good, glanced at my GPS to see my overall pace. Hey, I'm flying (a relative term), but then I hit the Yellow/White connector and suddenly, I wasn't flying. It's a mile uphill at about a 15% grade, so flying is out of the question. Anyway, I started thinking that when I was coaching marathoners, one of my cornerstones was Specificity of Training...if you're going to run a hilly marathon, train on hills...if you're running in the heat, train in the heat...if you want to run 9'/mile, do most of your running at 9'/mile. And therein is one of the big differences between road running and trail running. On a road, you can pretty much pace yourself fairly evenly, despite some ups and downs, and monitor that pace as you proceed during your run. Even pace is the key, right? Well, hit the trail and all that goes down the toilet. Hills, mountains, roots, rocks, ruts, water crossings, etc, plays havoc with your pace. So, I started thinking, does it even pay to waste your time fretting how fast (or slow) you're going at any particular moment in time during your trail training run?

It’s interesting how the range of view on appropriate training paces is rather narrow for virtually every running event up to the marathon, but once we move into the realm of ultras (particularly trail ultras), the near consensus all but disappears. Many people appear to advocate the value of training at your target pace to get your body accustomed to everything that that pace involves, while others would advise training faster than race pace to better build strength and fitness.

One of the shortcomings in some discussions may be the failure to recognize how a lot of people actually run during their ultras. First of all, except for the gifted few, of which most of the folks I know are not, you better conserve your energy at the beginning or you'll blowup well short of sniffing distance of the finish. Trail ultras force most of us to move at a relatively wide range of paces for various periods of time. We run when we can, walk when we decide that it’s more efficient to do so, or want to, and generally just try to avoid any significant physical or mental breakdowns along the way.

It’s natural (and mathematically convenient) to think about our race goals in terms of a single pace; the minutes per mile pace we hope to average over the length of the course in order to achieve a particular time. This may work fine on the road up to a marathon distance, but unfortunately, this average pace might not be particularly meaningful (apart from the finish time it yields), particularly for those of us who run our ultras in the middle or back of the back. For example, in the Oak Mt 50k Trail Race I ran last March, my average pace over the course was 17:03 per mile (ok, I know I didn't blaze that one, but I got under the 9 hour cutoff) – but I didn’t actually cover much of the course at anything near that pace. I went back and looked at the data broken up by my GPS watch (which died at about 7 hours). I only ran one mile at 17:03! The miles are broken up into 10 points per mile, and in the 250 points in the first 25 miles, 141 points were faster than 17:03 and 109 were slower. When I looked at the one minute zone around my average pace (i.e., 16:03-18:03), I found that only 8 miles fit in that zone – that’s not much more than 33% of the recorded distance.

Looking at the totals for various pace ranges, it becomes even clear(er) that my average race pace might not be particularly useful for structuring my future training because I was usually racing quite a bit faster or slower than that average pace.

If this is how I’m going to run an ultra, why would I try to build my training around that average pace? And if my goal is to run that same race next year and knock 15 or so minutes off my time, and run it at an average pace of 16:30/mile, would it really benefit me to spend more time on my feet at a 16:30 minute pace? The answer, I think, is that becoming more efficient at moving at 16-minute pace probably won’t help me as much as other training would. After all, I probably won’t do much of the race at that pace. If I were to try to maintain a 16:30 pace on the tricky rocky downhill section of the White Trail of the course then I’m going to take a flying header into a tree. And if I cruise the dirt jeep road and easy trail sections at that pace then I’m leaving way too much in reserve. Perhaps on long trail runs, where I’m going to be out for a few hours, I’ll average something that comes close to that goal race pace. But again, I’m likely to be moving faster or slower than that single goal pace during the training run. As with most aspects of life, you just do the best you can...this is where perceived exertion, I think, is the linchpin of trail training. Run hard when you can, run easy when you have to.

Oh heck, this was just a mental exercise to amuse me during my run today. Tell you what, I'm going to go out on the trail, enjoy every aspect about it (except the snakes) and at the end, I'll check my OVERALL pace and see how I did. But you know what? If I'm back at my car, I did good.

I'll see you on the roads or the trails - Al


"One child lost is too many...one child saved can change the world."