Sydney Marathon

Endomondo Running Workout

This might be the last Endomondo report because finally I am convinced that it has been overstating my distances significantly. This map of the race ends in Pyrmont, at about the 37km mark, where the battery ran out. Note that Endomondo shows the distance as 41+ km; that's really inexcusable, even though I know that the GPS signal around Sydney is not so reliable. RunKeeper, which I have been trialling, has it at 38km, which is much closer. Anyway, I'll see. One nice feature in the Endomondo package is the heart rate in the statistics graph; however, that is why the battery on the phone went flat. Possibly the final straw for the phone was lending it to a distressed co-runner so he could call his wife to give a revised ETA - but I think it would be a pity not to be able to do that.

Anyway, on to the race. I can't really decide how disappointed I am; after all, there are no sheep stations at stake and the finish time is respectable (<6 min/km pace). But I did really want to push down below 3:45, and I didn't really think there was much risk of not beating 4:00. Now I know better.

A number of factors went into the result. Clearly I went out too hard; I can see looking at the statistics that for most of the first 10 km I was running well below 5 min pace. That is something I would never have predicted, and in fact, I was running with an event pacer in an attempt to control my early-event enthusiasm. What I wanted to do was run at exactly 5 minute pace for the whole event, accepting that I might slow down over the last 10 km. I suspect that those early 4:30 kilometers came back to haunt me. Lesson one: only trust your own pacing. (Actually, that was a bit of a technology failure as well, I had a wireless phone earpiece to tell me the pace - the phone contains the GPS unit- but I could never get it to stick in the ear, so I left it out on race day. Anyway, I guess it would have murdered the battery even sooner) I don't have much "feel" for how fast I'm running; 5 minute kilometers are my normal training pace & some days they feel slow & easy and other days they feel like hard work. I used to run with a wristwatch heart rate monitor, but its sensor has given out & while the phone has picked up the slack with the HRM, I don't like running with the phone in my hand. Apart from anything else, all that sweat wouldn't be good for it. The good thing about the HRM on the wrist was I could just set a heart rate target and hold that regardless of speed; heart rate correlates pretty closely with comfort, so it's quite effective. Whatever, I need to work on pace management and I guess ideally a reliable equipment free judgement is the best - although, when exhausted, I'm not sure that there is such a thing as reliable judgement.

What you can see from the chart is that up to about 32 km I was sort of going OK; slowing down through 5:30 towards 6:00, and struggling a bit with the hills. Then at about 34 km I had to stop running simply out of leg fatigue & start walking, so I did that for about 3km and managed - not easy - to start running again. I'm a bit annoyed with the failure of the GPS, because I would really like to know how fast I managed to cover the last 5 km.

The heat didn't help. I drank lots of water, so I wasn't dehydrated (I usually start babbling to myself in Chinese when I get dehydrated, so that's quite an easy empirical test) but I was certainly hot. I don't know how being hot slows you down from a metabolic point of view, but I might conduct some research into that. Particularly the Pyrmont section - the last third of the race - is pretty much pure cement & asphalt and collects a lot of heat from the surrounding buildings. My feeling is that 25 degrees in the shade would easily be over 30 running up the Western Distributor. It looks on the map as though there'd be a relieving view of water in Cockle Bay, but in fact you're running along inside the concrete walls that edge the freeway and the water doesn't really impinge on the consciousness. For a city which prides itself on the picturesque, this marathon route is distinctly ordinary from a visual perspective. A couple of 18th century style "views", but for the rest, street, and pretty drab street to boot. Curiously, in Canberra I had sore feet from, I suspect, the rain, a problem I had never encountered in training, while here I had hot feet, a problem I've never had in training before either. I've run in hotter conditions than Sunday, although not often and not as far. (That's how I know what I do when I'm dehydrated) Apart from the overheating though, the shoes (same model as Canberra) and the socks (new and wholly synthetic) were very satisfactory. No blisters, no chafing, no bruised toes. In fact, other than the kind of stiffness you'd expect after a solid run, the body is in pretty good shape. In particular the knees are completely free of pain; last Thursday I was worrying that I couldn't rest them enough before the race.

I think the nutrition plan was OK; the stopping wasn't, so far as I am any judge, related to energy available. I didn't actually stop, rather slowed to a walk until my legs felt up to running again. Not that I have anything other than apocryphal information about what a nutrition failure would feel like.

On the principle that you learn from your mistakes, there's a fair bit to take out of this. One tricky thing about running is that you can't really modify one parameter at a time and see how much impact it has. Prior to the next big run - as yet undecided - I'll be making a number of changes. Hopefully one or more of the them will get be back down under 4 hours.

I've thought of a way to compare marathon results. I think it works quite well for the "average" runner - it wouldn't, perhaps, work so well for extremes. It works like this; Canberra, 55, 50, 57; Sydney, 54, 49, 54. They are the percentiles for field, men, age group respectively, and in fact the age group in Sydney was 50-54 compared with Canberra's 50-59, so it's not quite a four-square comparison. But it's not bad, I think, and  it equalises out the course & the environment. Clearly Sydney was not as good, but equally the difference isn't enormous.

Pictures can be seen here:  Link to pictures...

It's probably obvious - certainly in retrospect - but cumulative marathon training doesn't make much difference. I was expecting an additional 5 months training to automatically improve my performance, but now I think that maintaining training at the same level, which is pretty much what I did, wasn't/isn't likely to make much difference over a long run. I probably need to find a coach, and possibly need to find more training time - not likely - if I'm going to get down to 3:30. (The winner in my division in Sydney ran 3:04, for comparison. Just in case anyone thinks 3:30 is unrealistic)