I’ve now finished the core of my marathon training, and I’m officially in taper mode for the next three weeks leading up to St. George marathon. In case I haven’t previously explained, I’m looking to run a fast enough race at St. George to qualify for the Boston Marathon (I need a 3:20 or better). Qualifying for Boston is something of a “holy grail” for recreational runners, and if it happens, it would certainly represent my most impressive athletic accomplishment. With that goal in mind, fifteen weeks ago I embarked on an extremely challenging marathon training program, resulting in several training PRs and a couple racing PRs as well.

I’ve already mentioned a couple of my accomplishments — my 45 day running streak, my 100 mile training week, and my half-marathon PR — but here’s a summary of several other milestones I surpassed during this training cycle:

• Highest Mileage Month: 362 miles (previous best was 260 miles)
• Most 20+ Mile Training Runs: 8 (prior best was 4)
• Most 14+ Mile Training Runs: 26
• Average Weekly Mileage: 80.7 miles (prior training average was 51.1 miles)
• 10K Race Time: 43:03 (a 1 minute, 10 second PR)

So with three weeks still to go, I’ve logged a total of 1211 training miles so far, in 142 separate workouts, aggregating 170 hours, 12 minutes of running. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

Ok, that’s more than enough patting myself on the back when my goal race is still several weeks away. However, I do want to make a few parting observations on my training:

Running this level of mileage is very difficult, especially for someone like me who’s only moderately talented. Not only do the extra miles themselves take a lot of time, but it takes me longer to run them because my training paces are significantly slower than the typical runner who might tackle this kind of workload. It added up to a lot of time on my feet (an average of 11.5 hours running per week), and frankly I consider myself a bit lucky to have made it through the hard part of my training without injury or burnout.

I could not have completed this level of training without the guidance of a well-designed training plan. In my case, it was Pete Pfitzinger’s 18 week “70+” marathon training plan from his book Advanced Marathoning. By studying the book, I knew the intended purpose of every workout, as well as how every single workout was related to all the other workouts. This gave me the confidence to attempt a training regimen far beyond my comfort zone, and the commitment to see it through as designed by Pfitzinger.

Apropos of the foregoing, I could not have completed this level of mileage without a substantial volume of recovery workouts, run at a sufficiently low intensity to permit true recovery between hard workouts. I credit Pete’s plan with dictating a generous quota of recovery runs (his 70+ schedule prescribes an average of about 20 miles of recovery running per week). This allowed me to make the leap to running 80-90 miles per week, 7 days a week, while significantly upping the volume and intensity of my hard days too. I also credit my Garmin’s HR monitor for helping me stay honest on recovery days.

Having gone through this “experiment” myself, I now firmly believe that higher mileage is the single best way for most runners to improve their performance in general. However, high mileage isn’t a miracle cure. My HM and 10K times both came down nicely, but not phenomenally. I basically expect the same for my marathon time: notable improvement, but nothing incredible. My best guess is that my marathon PR will come down by around 15 minutes. That’s a heck-of-a-lot of training for a (hopefully) 15 minute improvement. High mileage will almost certainly help an average runner become a better average runner — maybe even a very good average runner — but it isn’t going to amazingly transform them into an elite athlete.

I think there’s only so much improvement a runner can make in 15 weeks, and no amount of training is going to change those genetic/physiological limitations. I’m learning that substantial improvement takes commitment and hard work over a substantial period of time — several years, let alone several training cycles. Taking on a higher training workload is not a shortcut to greatness; it’s but one step in the progress curve (albeit an important one).

I admit that my high mileage “experiment” might have been a case of overkill. It’s possible that I could have made the exact same gains while training 20 miles less each week. But, I’ll say this: even if it was overkill, at least I know that I did everything possible to help me get that BQ in St. George. I’ll take pride in that, even if I ultimately fall short of my goal.

That being said, I have no regrets about tackling this program. No one knows their true limits until they test them. When I started running three years ago, it would have been utterly inconceivable to imagine myself running a 100 mile training week, or a 360 mile month, or a 45 day running streak. I would have sworn that such efforts were simply beyond my innate abilities. I know better now, and I’m a better athlete for it.