The days of big gains in my running times have come to an end. Gains of 10 mins off my PB in a half marathon or up to 30 mins in a marathon weren't uncommon back in the day. And I thought that if I put in the hard work in training, I could keep up the big gains to get faster.
Now that I'm a more mature and more experienced runner, I've come to realise that gains in my running will be a lot less than before, even with an increased training load. When I set that goal to break 3 hours in a marathon last year, I had no idea how much work it would take to improve by 22 minutes at my current running level. In the end, after a long period of training, I was only able to improve by 80 seconds, and I thought I worked pretty hard too.
One runner told me, "Goals are fine, but no one can predict how much any one person will respond to any certain training, so the question on 'how can I run 3:00 in nine months' is pointless!"
When I first started running, I got faster by simply getting out and running. Fast or slow, all the miles contributed to something. Doing the same workouts over and over produced good results as I got more and more efficient.
After around 3 years, I found that I got all the easy gains as my body has learned to run well. Now I have to get significantly more fit to finish faster.
Some runners need to double their mileage to go from 3:22 to 3:00. Others can get there by repeating their last training cycle, so no one can tell me what I need to do to get 22 minutes faster.
However, this will always hold true - increase my base mileage with some focused speedwork and I will get faster. If I increase the mileage at the best rate your body can adapt to, and run some intelligent speedwork that is all I can do. Might get me 2:55, might get me 3:05, but it's also up to genetics, nutrition, sleep, the weather and other uncontrollable factors.
It's safe to say that every succeeding 10 minutes of improvement takes progressively more work than before.
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