Today for my longer tempo run I tried a little Galloway experiment. For those who may not know Jeff Galloway is an Olympic medelist (10,000 M)who later went on to become one of America's premier running coaches - perhaps coaching more runners to their first successful completion of a marathon event then any other coach. No small accomplishment. Galloway is not without controversry though - his popular run/walk method leaves some hardcore (or those who think they are) unnerved by the fact that a mere mortal (Oprah) claim that they've RUN a marathon when clearly there was some walking involved. I leave that for the hardcore to judge - I like walk breaks and I like Galloway. The therory of walk breaks is that by taking shceduled, early walk breaks the runner will save his/her legs for the final miles of the race. It's not a way to beat the wall - but maybe circumvent it by a bit. Or maybe still to have fresher legs to kick through it. I ran my second fasted half marathon time with walk breaks (4min run/3 second walk) and my fastest without - I might have run it even faster if I took them, I don't know. I lknow I take them quite frequently on ultras although they're seldom planned, usually I allow the terrain to dictate the breaks. So anyway, today - long tempo run, 8:37 pace for 8.5 miles. Actual running pace was low 8s to high 7s so really only lost about 20 seconds with the walk breaks. And I felt great afterwards - ready for more miles. Usually my tempo runs are without walk breaks - thus the experiemnt. I liked it and think it will be a keeper for the longer tempo runs. An 8:37 pace with a kick left at the end may get me to 3:40 later this year (Baltimore, where I fade at the end - every year)I could be happy with that.
Peace,
Eric
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