a start to marathon training

My wife began her marathon training today. We ran 12 as an inaugural long run. She did wonderfully. She's in excellent aerobic shape.

The long run is usually the centerpiece of any marathon training plan, but there are some runners and coaches and groups, such as Brooks Hansons, who build fitness through increased total mileage and limit the long run to 16. This approach makes perfect sense. I can't explain the physiology of it but it seems intuitively true based on my own experience and what I've heard. Eighty miles a week, for example, will get you in more or less the same shape for a marathon whether you run 25% of that mileage on Saturday morning or not. I know a man who ran 2:25 with his longest run being 14 miles. He ran in college. Craig Virgin, I read somewhere, didn't run longer than 18 before he finished second in Boston to Seko. You wonder, though, if he'd have won had he done 22.

Frank Shorter never exceeded 22 in his long runs; his training partner Kenney Moore would go as far as 40 some days. Pro runners in America today top out at 24-25. For two of my marathons I've prepared by doing a long run of 24 miles. The rest, I've done 23. I found in my first few maratons that my body somehow knew the mileage it had trained up to, that it started hurting at the mile marker that was the longest long run I'd done. It was especially marked at my first Boston in 2008. Would this still hold true today? Could I get away with doing more intense long runs of 20-22 and altogether ignore the 23-4 mile run? At Richmond I felt that the race was less an aerobic challenge than a challenge of speed and strength, and that while miles and miles of aerobic pace runs had given me a solid base, I hadn't shaped that base into a fine racing instrument. I'd accumulated a big shapeless mound of miles. So this season, strength and athleticism.

Athleticism is a funny word. It's something I've only heard used in the last few years. I've heard it used in reference to football and basketball players: "He has great athleticism on the field." And it is also in the vocabulary of coaches and trainers as something they can work on with athletes (though put this way it sounds tautological, it is not): they work on the player's speed and agility and coordination, the ability to move well.

What everyone wonders is the extent to which the ability to move well, or "athleticism," is educable. What does it mean that that the human body is at once so plastic and so limited? While it's a very uneven, poorly written movie for the most part, "Without Limits" is the best possible title for a distance running movie, for it describes both the fantasy of distance runners, to be without limits, and the condition which, were the fantasy realized, would make distance running impossible as a pursuit. Distance running, like everything else, needs that limit to be intelligible.