I think of the early season races, especially in a marathon build-up, as kind of like the early returns on election night. They can tell you some valuable information, but must be taken in the context of the whole process. For example, a 5k race early in a marathon build up can tell you about the maximal aerobic capacity of a runner, which is one important variable for marathon performance. However, it doesn’t tell you anything about how the runner is going to handle the duration of the event, or its metabolic demands. It’s kind of like one precinct reporting early on election night, in a campaign that includes many other precincts with a wide range of fairly different populations.
This past week, for example, Dakotah Popehn competed in the Antrim Coast Half Marathon in Northern Ireland. She competed well, placing 5th in a very good international field. Her time of 1:08:47 is about a minute off her best time. This is a good indicator, especially as we are kind of mid-way through the marathon build-up, with some big work still to come. The time and place are, of course, helpful objective information. We are also very interested in how the race felt. For example, if an athlete felt strong and ran a steady pace throughout, as Dakotah did, we can feel pretty good about how the marathon training is going.
Joel Reichow and Mo Bati ran the Night Moves 5000m on Wednesday night, and also got some good information on their fitness. Whereas Dakotah is running the Chicago Marathon (Oct. 11), Joel and Mo are racing NYC Marathon, three weeks later. They were racing more of an “off” distance, and a little further out from their goal race. So we can’t put too much stock in these results. However, Mo’s 14:10 was a personal best, which is always a positive sign, especially given that he did virtually no specific 5k training prior to this race. Joel’s 13:58 was likewise a generally good sign, as he ran essentially the same time as last year (13:58.58 last year, versus 13:58.19 this year), and was able to close really hard the last 1000m.
Coming up on Labor Day and the week after, we’ll have some more races for our fall marathoners – the New Haven Road Race (the USATF 20k Championships), the Victory 10k, and the City of Lakes Half Marathon. These will all help us understand how our fitness is progressing, and hopefully also break up the hard training with a little taste of competition, which is of course the point of all of that work! However these races go, we try to not get either too excited or too down based on the results. Rather, we interpret the results as information that we can use as we move ahead into the next few weeks of training.
Chris Lundstrom is the head coach of Minnesota Distance Elite – formerly Team USA Minnesota – which includes some of the top distance runners in the USA, including Annie Frisbie, Dakotah Lindwurm, Breanna Sieracki and Joel Reichow.
