Houston Marathon

All right, well, let's pivot to Houston Race Weekend.

The Houston Marathon Weekend has shown up over and over throughout your running history.

How many times have you participated at this point, and what does that weekend mean to you?

It means everything.

So you can increase, but we should always think about with running step increases, like one step rather than two steps or three steps.

So if the most that you've sustained historically, ever is consistent 30 kilometer running weeks then yeah you can probably go to 40 kilometer or you can try to go to 40 kilometer running weeks for your next marathon build but don't try to jump to 60 or 70 because the sub three hour marathon plan says that that's what you should be doing that's an issue that i have with a for a long time that historically have been and I think they're really good plans but the concept of using a target time to then choose a plan so some three hour plan some two thirty plan because yeah I think that that's you're starting at the wrong end there you need to start with what you can what you can sustain but then within that if I'm assuming now that you really want to do your best marathon I would try to really maximize the run volume that you can sustain and it's okay if you have a limited time budget or you have a certain time budget then it's okay during this block to you basically reduce the swim can drop right back as you said and maybe maintain something or maintain a little bit to not lose all your feel for the water and and the biking you just use that to fill up your time budget with additional aerobic volume and the nature of the biking i would say for for marathon training i would tend to make very polarized so maybe one sort of high intensity session in the week where you really get uh get that sort of um that vo2 max stimulus which translates more than i wouldn't do threshold or tempo biking during a marathon block i would do do it quite polarized here Easy rides, easy volume, and then maybe a high intensity session that is going to transfer more than the sort of more peripheral adaptations that you might get from a threshold or more tempo ride.

Yeah, no, agreed.

So let's move on to the next question.

...

... three miles.

[laughs]

Also still running in races.

Not too familiar with Houston, but I was aware of Chevron Marathon and The Aramco half.

And so the Aramco half was the very first run.

Well, one of the first few runs I did here.

Like, it's historically a fast race, and they already have the infrastructure, so it's easy for them to host a championship and put on another high-caliber race, right? Something that I know that the old people are, when I say this, are gonna look back to how it used to be in the US.

This is, like, my number one argument for the Olympic trials is why doesn't the Houston Marathon or the New York City Ma- Like, these races used to host the Olympic trials inside of their races.

Yeah.

And now it's like we have to create this whole separate event, and it...

Well, I think that's actually the reason is from a financial perspective, the races are like, "Hey, we're making all this money.

We basically have to give up all this money to do all this stuff that USATF wants.

Why would we, the Houston Marathon, basically, you know, give away all of our profit to USATF just so we could host the half mara- half the, the Olympic trials?" And I think that's basically what happened and why you've seen the last couple of trials have been standalone events.

So I wonder if that same deal's been struck here with Copenhagen and World Athletics, if World Athletics is squeezing them dry for every penny that they would've made this weekend, or if they're get- if it's a worthy, profitable affair for them to be the host-

That's her wording.

[lips smack] Uh, she's five feet tall and, you know, is young, and she says she runs marathons on impulse, including the Houston Marathon.

Shout out.

Whoa.

I also like to think about the landmarks that might help me push, particularly over the final mile or two miles in the race so that I can use those as cues to really push or to instigate my kick.

For example, one example of that that I've talked about before is with the Houston Marathon, you're running from west back to east into downtown and then you go across downtown over the final mile to the convention center on the other side of Houston.

And there's about 10 intersections that you cross, 10 lights that you go through as you cross downtown before you get to that final straightaway.

And so those 10 intersections become landmarks for me that cue me to push a little bit at each one as I'm counting them down mentally in my head.

And I was like, okay, I'm gonna actually put in a marathon training cycle and see what happens.

And that's when I ran the 2017 Houston Marathon in January of 2017.

And I was, like, an hour and 10 minutes faster than my first marathon, and that was off of still not, like, a fully complete marathon cycle.

But that was, like, that was the definitive transition of dropping, like, the heavy strength training and moving into endurance sports and seeing what I could actually do at the marathon distance.

All right.

And she kind of gave me side eye, you know, in the tech meeting the day before the Houston Marathon.

And then I saw the split start rolling in and I just finally jumped out to 16 miles.

And I said, slow down.

Now, contrast that with my first marathon.

where I literally surgically removed my brain from my skull and punted it into the Gulf of Mexico.

So what happened was it was 68 degrees Fahrenheit, started the Houston Marathon in 1997.

I was dead set on running 229 in my very first marathon, and I was plenty fit to do it.