Marathon prepp

First of all, for the period up until the Marathon in October I will write the blog in english. I case I have some fellow nerds amoung my international collegues that find and read the blog. 

During summer training has been alright, except for during our tripp to Stockholm there I only managed to train 1 of 5 days. 

Most of my thoughts go towards teh marathon, I still ride the MTB but there I don't really have any set goals. I might still ride some of the local races in the north, but does I can still do without any specific preparation. The marathon however requires more thought and preparation. 

Through the event I got the oppertunity to speka with a prolific marathon coach, and his take was that I dont need to bother with hard running intervals but rather should focus on volume and durability and fatigue resistance - makes sense! My "heart and lungs" are already strong enough to not be the bottleneck in my performance - but the running legs are the limiting factor. I still get enough intervall work on the bike. 

So now I'm focusing on running a bit longer 2-3 times per week. Actually its been 2 times, but I might try to up it to 3 times going into the fall. 

This week I got to ride with Stefan Tengman from Piteå and one of the days we did laps on my XCO course at Rösberget in Skellefteå. There it was obivous I dont really have that final XCO capacity. I could go decently hard but I lack the ability to push the uphills with like 400 watts and then recover in the decents and then hit it again a minute later. I had to park at threshold in the uphills after a while. So I lack that XCO repreability. And it's just from riding too few hours. For the running I'm also now gearing the training towards less variable effort and more steady grind - "gnet" as we call it in Swedish. 

I have thought about the goal time for the marathon alot. I think with my endurance and VO2max I should be able to run a sub 3 marathon - IF I was a runner! That if is most of my training was towards running and steadystate running in particular. I would never dare aim for sub 3 in my first marathon, especially since it is underground in some very special and untrainable circumstances. 3:30 on the other hand is something I think, hope(?), can be stable safe level. So I have settled on investigating what  5min/km pace feels like for longer durations. Last monday i did a 21k run on very flat terrain. I used 150 grams of carbs. Pace was 4:54 min/km and the heartrate, as seen in the image below, was very steaady between 147-150 throughout. Legs feel a bit tired alreaady afteer 10k, but then they feel about the same after 20 k as well. I'm tired, not hurting. I could definetly go on and that is what i need to test - I will try to go 25k or 30k at 5 min/km and see how that feels during the 3:rd 10k! Problem is that 30k takes a really long time! SO i get a bit bored with the steady pace, and also I have hard time prioritizing such long wrokouts these days.     

I will not be running longer then 30k since it hurt the rest of training to much. But if 30k stills feels alright I will try to run 20-25-30k at a slightly higher pace. A marathon time of 3:15 would be nice, and that corresponds to a pace of 4:37 min/km. So perhaps I could even try a 4:40 for 20k. The challenge is that I'm certain I CAN run 20k in 4:40 min/km, but its difficult to say what happens for the last 15k of a marathon in that pace. 

As you see, there is alot of thought into this from my side.

I have also found a 2.5 km spot on a gravelroad, gamla varuträskvägen, that has the same grade as the event 2%, gamla varuträskvägen. I plan to run some of these pace tests up and down that 2.5 km spot, to get a feel for the elevation and if that matters and if the pace should be adapted for going up and down. 

I have almost forgot that I'm also running the Höga Kusten Trail in end of august! This event is something completely different with both severe elevation and trails. So I still need to traing som hills and trails. 

I did a 17 km trail run in Lycksele, link below - and this trail is proper gnarly all the way basically. And I got really tired from not being able to relax the run but always being active in line choice and feet placement. Also it was very warm and humid. I think the hills and mayby mainly the downhills can be killers in that event. But 28k feels manageble even if it has some big elevation.

https://www.strava.com/activities/15316637513

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