No harm being conservative on the first race, there’s a point where judgement is going to come into play, pacing guidelines are just that, guidelines. I have typically run by feel and monitored pace during all of my races, noting if it was high or low and making a call on how to respond.

Russ

For me, it has been quite accurate.

The marathon is near enough flat, with a handful of dead turns in: http://www.mapmytri.com/routes/view/111929753

I would say, that positive split marathons are the norm, and because the timing points are at 32K and 42.2K any uplift in pace in the last couple of kilometres could be lost in the average pace over that 10km gap. A few marathon datasets with mile-by-mile pacing or similar would be great here, but finding one with 4 splits was tough enough. Makes you wonder what could be done using pacing data from Garmin Connect, Strava or similar.

Russ

I’ll email you a paper I have on the effect of performance level on pacing strategies.

Cheers,

Andy

Adhering to the principle that you should, in a well paced race, be able to run within 10% of your marathon time, then your target pace for race day should be around 10% slower than your marathon pace. I’ve only come close to being on that 10% a few times, probably heading out at that pace and being in a position to keep the decline minimal would be about right for the Ironman trajectory of fade then pick up. Not that I’m advocating you pace according to this pattern, it just seems to be what happens and it’s interesting to observe that the top 20 show the same form, just not so pronounced as slower athletes. I’d go in with a plan to hold a steady pace and if able to push it in the final 10K, the pace I’d choose would likely fall in at around 10% slower than marathon pace; once racing, I’d be watching how I felt to help guide me though.

If you’ve not run a marathon of course, you’ll need to guestimate that marathon pace off training/racing times elsewhere. McMillan run calculator is pretty reliable for me in estimating paces across different distances.

Russ