{"id":723,"date":"2021-07-26T16:15:58","date_gmt":"2021-07-26T20:15:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/?p=723"},"modified":"2021-07-26T17:07:54","modified_gmt":"2021-07-26T21:07:54","slug":"training-week-5-goodbye-gallowalking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/marathon\/2021\/07\/training-week-5-goodbye-gallowalking\/","title":{"rendered":"Training week 5: goodbye, Gallowalking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

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<\/a>. 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<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

31.79% of Easthampton<\/a>! (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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n