It’s almost time for the London Marathon! And it wouldn’t be marathon week without a geeky post delving into the data generated through training… So the totals are in for the 8 week block leading up to one week before the London marathon.
In summary the key numbers are: 1453 km in 121 hours giving an average of 181.7 km per week just sneaking in under 5 min/km with the biggest 7 day block being 221.6 km at 4:58 min/km.
This time, unusually, I haven’t done any big races. Just a 6.4 km leg in a road relay so my running has been fairly monotonic, around 5 min/km and in chunks of 10k at a time, 3 times a day.
Using Tanda’s equation gives me a prediction of 2:45:26. Given that I have outperformed this particular predictor by 6 mins 32 seconds on average (over 7 marathons) I have confidence in a near 2:40 time being on the cards.
My heart rate has shown consistent improvement over the last 8 weeks and a 5k test at 170 beats per minute (which over 7 even-paced marathons I now know I can hold for up to 3 hours) resulted in a pace of 3:47 in full race gear… just enough to poke in under 2:40. Alongside this race simulation I have fitted two weeks of heart rate data against speed and the result suggests 2:39:25.
Age-grading… I don’t really have any races, however my performance on an undulating 6.4k road race scales to a marathon time of 2:41:59
So… clearly in PB shape (currently 2:44:14). But sub 2:40 is going to be very close. With Charlie, Axel and Matt on a 2:40 (or faster) schedule it’s going to be awfully tempting to go for it…
My last bit of geeking is the attached image – this visualises my entire 8 week training block. It’s a histogram of every kilometre I ran, showing how many were run at each pace (binned into 5 sec intervals). The colour shows how far in the past each km was ran – blue is older, red is newer.
So this training block has been in the same theme as previous blocks but with a twist – no racing! We’ll get a hint on Sunday as to whether or not this was an essential part of my past training strategy.