September 21, 2006
Nostalgia
Good interview with a guy from my former running club who has enough natural talent to run a 2:18 marathon on the flat (and 2:13 down a hill), but "only" after years of patient training. It's people like Matt that are more of an inspiration to even less talented people like me, because I've seen the work they put in and the gradual rewards for their hard work.
For what it's worth in the perennial debate about "how fast to run your long run", Matt was a 2:20-low marathoner / 30:30 10k runner in the summer of 1999/2000, and I was running around 34 minutes for 10k at that point. Yet the long runs we did as a group round the south coast of Wellington (see below) were totally comfortable, probably well over 7:00/miles, though they had typically been preceded by a 3000m or 5000m race the day before (me and others) or a tempo run (Matt and others). My point is not that one should never belt out a faster long run, but that 2:30 over hills and trails at 90 seconds/mile over marathon pace is good enough on a regular basis for a 2:20 guy, so it's probably good enough for the rest of us.
