lightheir wrote:
Sorry, but I have to disagree with some of the seemingly valid above points.
1) Nutrition
Sorry, but if you are outright bonking in your marathons, especially <mile 23, it is NOT a nutrition issue. It's a training issue. Unless you literally starved yourself the night before and morning of, you're not going to save the day by eating 200 more calories per hour. Go on any established marathon forum with experienced folks (like runnersworld sub 3hrs or sub 2:45 forums) and see how many of them are bemoaning or fine tuning their detailed calories/hr nutritional strategy pre or post-race. It's nearly zero, or actually zero. Everyone there who is running that fast (or even sub 3:30) knows that the bonk is stopped by mileage per week in training, and that if you're going to bonk, there is no amount of fueling you can do to stop it in the marathon.
I don't think anybody said that nutrition alone can overcome a lack of training. What I was saying at least, is that even if your training is perfect, if you do not also do your nutrition you will hit the wall.
I will also counter your point about bonk being dictated by miles per week. I think anyone who is say running 15 miles per week, could easily go out tomorrow and do a 26 mile walk as long as they took in adequate nutrition. Anyone has the capacity to do 26 miles, the pace you can do it at is a function of training, but the capacity to just do 26 miles at say 3 miles per hour does not really require any training (but it will take nutrition). Maybe we are just saying the same thing in different ways, you are saying you need more miles per week (yes, to hold onto a faster pace), I am saying the miles per week you are already doing are enough, provided you are honest about what pace that the miles you actually did can support. So we agree that pace and miles per week are closely correlated and you need to know what the correlation is to have a successful race. As we all learned in Once a Runner, a runner:
“A runner is a miser, spending the pennies of his energy with great stinginess, constantly wanting to know how much he has spent and how much longer he will be expected to pay. He wants to be broke at precisely the moment he no longer needs his coin.”
Back to my original point and basically the fundamental reason people bonk in marathons - they were unrealistic about the pace their training could support, went out too fast and crashed and burned. This is actually my fundamental theorem of success in life, managing your own and others expectations to a reasonable level and then you will almost never be disappointed. Most perceived failures are nothing more than the inability to set reasonable expectations at the outset.
There are probably a lot people who could have run a 3:45 marathon, went out at 3:20 pace because it felt easy and then ended up running a 4:15 and then incorrectly determined there was some "wall" at 20 miles because this is just the point in time when your miscalculation starts to catch up with you. Had nothing to do with training other than in reality they trained for a 3:45 marathon, but on race day had a delusion during the first ten miles that they had trained for a 3:20. This situation can be compounded by bad nutrition.