tri_yoda wrote:
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.
Ok - a bit of semantic clarification.
I'm talking about RACING a marathon. This doesn't mean you have to be a sub3 or sub4 marathon runner - but it does mean you are going to go out there and give it your best shot. All-out on race day, no holding back.
I agree that people are outpacing their training, but I STRONGLY disagree that nutrition will save them given their lack of training for their expected result. I'll even wager that for most, going back in retrospect and giving them +100 or +200 cal per hour will gain them at best, a few minutes on their total final race, if even that. The marathon bonk is different from the IM or even HIM bonk unless you're a 5+ hour marathon runner. In most cases, you aren't getting the shakes from severe caloric depletion in a marathon - you're getting the leg bonk from your legs overrunning their capacity. That's a training, not nutrition deficit.
I will definitely disagree strongly with you in the notion your statement that if you are optimally trained for the marathon (like 85+mpw with speedwork,etc), that with no nutrition (calories), you WILL hit the wall. If you pace it right, and conservatively, you definitely will NOT hit the wall, even with zero on-course calories, as long as you are trained properly (as above) and hydrate enough. Your body will be well trained by then to move into fat-burning zone early on, so you won't be burning only your carb reserves the whole way. I routinely do 18-20 mile training runs with zero calories (only water) at near 7min/mile pace, and I'm not close to bonking from an energy deficit.
And regarding the expectations issue, I think it's obvious that if you bonked in your marathon, you over-ran your ability (obviously), but that's still doesn't help with the critical task of setting a reasonable marathon race goal before race day. I think it's reasonable to shoot for a marathon time roughly in line with calculator estimates based on your shorter race results, with slower adjustments for course conditions, experience, difficulty, etc. So if you're a 19:00 5k runner, and you find that you're running 4 hour marathons every time (which is a big underperform relative to your 5k race results), you're barking up the wrong tree completely if you conclude that better fueling alone would have gotten you closer to the 3:15-3:20 calculator estimates. Whereas building to 70mpw will absolutely get you there, if not faster than that for the 26.2, even with zero calories added on-course. I think this way of looking at marathon goals by comparing shorter race results to longer ones is really what you want to be getting at in terms of expectations.