Trying to get ready for a marathon without a clue is quite easy, you listen to every opinion and make your own road. Having set my sights on Seattle's Rock and Roll Marathon June 26th, I am living in a deluge of information. The sheer volume and breadth of opinions on preparation is daunting. It causes me to take a little here, and a little there, overall it feels as if I am treading in ignorantly and proceeding on what "I" think I should do.
Eric Sach of The Balanced Athlete says that there will be hills. On reflection it seems reasonable, that in Seattle one might encounter hills. I've been running on level ground though - the Valley of Target Heart Rate.
You can see that when the elevation is not changing much that I can maintain a heart rate quite nicely. Small adjustments in speed will drop or raise it, and with the workload steady, control seems easy. I know that 26 miles on hilly terrain is not the same as 5 level straight miles. Now comes the challenge of the marathon - the only way to complete the marathon is to maintain a sustainable heart rate. The above run is at target heart rate and as you can see, the elevation change is give or take 20 feet. The spikes in the elevation readings above are typical errors due to the limited accuracy of GPS altitude measurement.
Hills toss in a whole new element of challenge:
You can see the predicament - maintaining a reasonable heart rate is a tough to say the least. During this course I ran the whole way, I did not maintain the same speed, but I maintained the same pace throughout - only shortening the steps to keep my heart rate down.
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