From 3:27 to 2:39 in Three Years
When Michaela and I first started working together in January 2023, she just wanted to BQ again. Now we’re looking at an OTQ.
Michaela came to me after 9 years of running and 13 marathons with a PR of 3:27. She was dedicated, she loved the sport, and she was ready to really believe in and invest in herself.
When I looked at the data from previous half marathons, speed workouts and the long runs she was doing for her past marathons, I quickly realized she already had the speed to run way faster than 3:27. Speed wasn’t the problem. The problem was that she couldn’t utilize the speed she had for a full marathon yet.
Often the instinct when you want to get faster is to keep doing faster intervals. More time at faster paces. But for Michaela, that would have been a waste of time. She didn’t need more of that short distance speed yet. She needed to learn how to sustain the speed she already had.
So while we did touch on some of that 5k-10k type speed, we made her threshold and marathon paced runs the priority. We made some of the threshold runs longer and I also gave her a variety of threshold workouts instead of doing the same one every week. We put a big emphasis on long runs with a lot of miles around what I thought her marathon pace should be based on some of her past interval and threshold runs.
There were never any big jumps in the length of those workouts. Just a gradual progression over a couple of months. But if you look at where she started versus where she finished, those small steps led to a huge change in the amount of work she could handle. By the end of that first cycle, she could handle a 15 mile progression run, broken up, starting above marathon pace and ending the last mile a touch faster, without feeling destroyed after. During these runs practicing exact race day fueling was also super important, not just for finishing the long run strong, but also for feeling better afterwards.
She went into her first Boston that April hoping to run around 3:19. She ran just under 3:02.
She’s not running sub-2:40 now because we just kept doing the same thing that worked for that Boston build. If you’re reading this thinking, I already focused on my threshold and my long runs and it stopped working, that’s because you have to know when to change things up.
Over time we’ve changed what Michaela’s focus needed to be. There have been periods where we built her mileage. Periods where she focused on hills. Periods where she did 5k and 10k type training. Each block addressed something different because what she needed kept evolving as she got better.
That’s what long term development actually looks like. It’s not one magic training cycle. It’s a smart, evolving plan that keeps identifying the next thing to work on and then actually doing that thing instead of just doing more of everything.
If you’re reading this and something about Michaela’s story sounds familiar, like you feel that you have way more in you but aren’t sure what you need to change, it might be that you’re not focusing on the right type of speed workouts for you.
That’s something we address from day one in the Breakthrough Lab. The program comes with four training plans. Two are built for runners who have the stamina but need more speed. Two are built for runners who have the speed but need more stamina, which is exactly where Michaela was. From there, the course walks you through how to adjust the plan further based on your specific needs, and both Sage and I are in the community chat every week to help you figure things out. There’s also a monthly live call where you can bring your questions and your training data directly to us.
If you want to learn more, you can check out the Breakthrough Lab here or reach out to me directly at sandi.higherrunning@gmail.com. I’m happy to answer any questions.
-coach Sandi Nypaver
