On my long run last week I had forgotten to take the walk break on the first couple of half-miles and had been doing it just once per mile. This week I forgot about it entirely for the first few miles and spontaneously decided to abandon the Gallowalking. It sounds good theoretically, but I did my first three marathons without it, and I haven’t been noticing any benefits. Galloway talks about people beating their best marathon times by a lot when they implement his method. BUT – how was their pace before? If you’re going out too fast and walking the last three or four miles, run/walk could definitely improve your time. If you’re pacing yourself well, as I do, it’s not as clear how it would help, unless you make a point of running faster during the run segments – and that would make it harder to know what’s left “in the tank” for me. The approach I use, where I pretend that the first 20 miles of the marathon is the last training run and the 6.2 is the actual race, has worked really well. Here’s someone reporting on exactly that – he concludes “Galloway’s method helps runners, even some good ones who run in the 3:00 range, to run faster marathons…..even, ostensibly, by large amounts…..simply because they haven’t learned or aren’t disciplined enough to run good marathons without them.”
Going back to walking only while drinking, combined with my photo and map-checking stops, seems just as good as extended walk breaks, and the 10 miles went by easily without much fatigue. I was super-thrilled for my pace to naturally match the 13:44 I need to finish in 6 hours! It was a rainy morning, so that helped. I’m glad I’ve been getting up at 4:30 on Sundays; I don’t actually get out the door until well after 5, but so far that’s still gotten me home, with bagels, early enough to feel like the day isn’t gone.
31.79% of Easthampton! (Still in 5th place.) I got in some long roads, the entire eastern corner (a narrow little “handle,” so easy to complete), some nice residential streets, and all of the Harvest Valley Condominiums. It’s a tremendously boring development with so many almost-identical houses, but the gardens were nice, the main street is “Lazy ‘D’ Drive” (love a lazy letter!), the views of Mount Tom would be awesome on a clear day, and it led me to identify a trait of newly developed neighborhoods that I’d been sort of aware of without thinking about: offset cul-de-sacs branching off a main road are really easy for things like plowing, deliveries, and running every street. You just go straight, left, straight, right etc. until you’re done; no possibility of getting in a loop or skipping a street.
Date (temp/humidity) | Distance | Avg pace/fastest split | Time | HR (avg/highest) | Notes |
Tue 7/20 (69°F/96%) | 3.09 | 12:08/11:14 | 37:27 | 141/163 | |
Thu 7/22 (63°F/90%) | 5.55 | 12:16/11:11 | 1:08:06 | Intervals only: 136/168 | |
Fri 7/23 (66°F/81%) | ~3 | 12:09 (first mile) | 37:33 | 140/171 | Runkeeper crashed |
Sun 7/25 (66°F/97%) | 10.14 | 13:39/12:48 | 2:18:27 | 138/171 | |
Totals | ~21.8 miles | | 4.7 hours | | Weight avg 116.7, resting heart 57 |