Going Long: An Interview with Pete Pfitzinger

I recently caught up with Pete Pfitzinger, two-time U.S. Olympian in the marathon with a 2:11:43 personal best, exercise scientist, and author of Advanced Marathoning. Pfitzinger, along with his longtime collaborator and co-author Scott Douglas, recently published the fourth edition of his bestselling book, which is geared toward competitive ambitious amateurs looking to race faster over 26.2 miles.

Over the past two decades I’ve learned so much from Pete and the work he’s put out into the world has helped shape my own perspective on marathon training and how to structure a program. I’ve had a copy of Advanced Marathoning on my bookshelf since my first marathon in 2007 and was also a dedicated reader of his monthly Lab Report column in Running Times back in the day. It was a real treat to talk all things marathon training with him, what’s been updated in the latest edition of his book, the influence on super shoes and sports nutrition on the marathon in recent years, and a lot more.

Mario: When you first put out Advanced Marathoning almost 25 years ago—you were already writing the Lab Report before that—did you imagine that 25, 30 years later this is what you would still be doing in one way, shape, or form?

Pete: Probably not. I mean, I’m not sure I ever thought more than a year in advance back then. But it’s been great. I really love working with Scott Douglas. He’s amazing in his knowledge, his full immersion in running, and he’s great to kind of pin me back when I go a bit crazy on some of the elements of the writing.

In what elements of the writing do you tend to go crazy?

Well, the most famous one—at least between Scott and me this time—was overreaching. So I read all the new articles on this and thought I’d done a great job. And Scott was like, “Well, yeah, but is that for this book, or is this for something else?” I just was so interested in the topic and I just went way overboard. So we cut it way back. 

Let’s talk about the book. I haven’t gotten a copy of the latest edition yet, but it caught me by surprise because the third edition came out just five or so years ago. So I’m curious, what spurred you to want to update it and come out with this new edition?

It just felt like time. There’s been a lot of change. I mean, super shoes are an element of it. Nutrition, there’s much more awareness and knowledge, I guess, now than there was. And yeah, it felt like we were a bit dated with the book, and it was time to do it.

So was it mostly the super shoes and the nutrition? From the standpoint of products, those are the two biggest changes that we’ve seen in the last five to ten years, no doubt. Or was it also some of the methodology behind the training that maybe these products helped to shift a little bit as well?

We did the most in-depth review of the training programs that we’ve ever done. So if I go back—the first edition, the second edition, the third edition—there were little tweaks. But this time I developed spreadsheets and looked at essentially the density of the hard work in each schedule. So we have four different chapters based on your mileage, and then each one has a 12-week schedule and an 18-week schedule.

So I really went through all that very carefully, looking for places where there was too much work clustered together. And that’s one of the advantages of the book having been around a long time: we get a lot of feedback. And a lot of the feedback is, “Well, look, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday is tough, because the weekends are usually a good amount of work. Monday and Friday are usually kind of easy. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday we’re balancing—ooh, how much do we want to fit in here versus what is really the right thing in terms of recovery?”

So I’m really happy with the changes in the training schedules this time. We’ve taken out a little bit of work, a little bit of mileage. Things are reordered within a week to help ensure that it’s more hard/easy. There’d be a place where I was fitting in a medium long run, and then I go look at it and think, “That doesn’t really fit. That’s just too much.” 

And that is in large part from the feedback: people saying, “Well, gee, I just couldn’t quite do this.” So I think now, if you look at stimulus and recovery, the stimulus is 99% of what it was, but there’s say an extra 10% recovery in there. 

When you were putting these new plans together, how were you thinking about the introduction of super shoes into people’s lives and just more knowledge and discussion around the importance of fueling some of your hard workouts and long runs?

With the super shoes there is the ability to—well, you’re less beat up. So you’re going to get less beat up from a marathon pace run that might’ve been on Sunday. So can you do a little bit more by Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? There’s a little bit of that, but not too much, because I think I’ve had a tendency to push things.

So in general, these training schedules—they’re tough, and they’re trying to help the runner get as much out of themselves as possible, to improve as much as they can, but trying to do it in an intelligent way, keeping the risk of injury and overtraining low. 

And I guess it’s similar with nutrition as well. I’m still a believer that it’s very helpful to deplete your carbohydrate stores in some of your longer runs and harder efforts. There’s still evidence that glycogen storage is stimulated by glycogen depletion. So you don’t want to give up on that—it’s been part of marathon training for a long time. But we also know that doing too much of that is not good for recovery. So it’s just a matter of, OK, how do you ensure that the runner is doing enough depletion-type training to get that physiological benefit, but they’re not exhausted all the time? That they’re refueling quickly after the session so that they’re getting the stimulus, but they’re also able to train hard again as quickly as possible.

It just sounds like it’s more of a matter of picking your spots with those types of runs versus in the past that would be the norm more often than not.

Exactly. The training gets more and more intelligent as time goes on. Some of the things that we thought were right 25 years ago have been proven to be right—we didn’t know why. And then some of the things were like, “Oh man, we were just overdoing it, flogging ourselves.” And the training now—you can train at a higher level more often because you’re bouncing back more quickly, because you’ve got your diet right, you’re using the super shoes in the right way.

Let’s dig into something that you just said there: 25 years ago, something that you believed in that still holds true today, that hasn’t changed. Let’s use your book as an example. Through four editions of this book what has not changed in the last two-and-a-half decades?

You [still] have to complete the distance. And you want to complete the distance without having the last few miles be a very tough experience where you’re really slowing down. So that’s really the cornerstone of marathon training—up until you get up towards the elite end.

And so the programs still include the long runs. The long runs still are done at a solid—or most of them, not all of them, but most of them—are done at a solid effort and done in a progressive way so that you’re running just say 10% slower than marathon race pace in the last, say, eight miles of your long run. And that hasn’t really changed for this population.

So the people the book’s for—guys who are, say, 2:30 to 3:45, and women who are, say, 2:50 to 4 hours—tends to be most of the readers. So it’s not elite. When you try to write for the elite, you make it less applicable for everyone else. And that’s probably something that we’re better at now. Even trying to do that in the first edition, I’m sure by the fourth edition, we just have a better understanding of our readers—who they really are, what their lives are really like, and how to make sure that you’re accommodating the rest of their life with the training.

Going back 25 years to the first edition of Advanced Marathoning, what is something that you have changed your mind on?

Well, I guess in terms of diet, we understand the importance of protein now more than we did. So I look at the first edition, it was, “Yeah, drink more fluids and eat more carbohydrates.” You could pretty much sum it all up there.

But now there’s a much better understanding that getting protein in shortly after your training is really helpful. Getting carbohydrates in shortly after training is helpful. We knew that, but we understand that better now.

One area that tends to evolve with every edition of the book is caffeine. And now it’s known that there are three different genotypes for caffeine—that as an individual, you’re either going to get a solid benefit, a little benefit, or actually it can be detrimental. That’s quite interesting to know, because if someone’s been taking caffeine and thinking, “This just is no good for me,” well, it probably isn’t.

So that’s been really interesting. In terms of the training, I think the more general understanding of progression runs—the benefits there—and marathon-pace runs specifically. I mean, I can remember 40 years ago, Bill Squires, who was coaching the Greater Boston Track Club and Bill Rodgers, etc.—the word he said most often was “simulation.” And he would set up long training runs that were simulating the Boston Marathon or whatever it was. And the more I look at how training has evolved, it’s simulating what the challenge is that you’ve put in front of you—whether it’s a marathon or whatever it might be.

As you’re thinking about this population that you describe, in terms of the key training elements to put together a successful marathon, how would you stack those in terms of their hierarchy or order of importance? 

The long run would still be number one. You need to be able to sustain the pace for the full marathon distance. You need to be able to handle the marathon distance.

Now, the longer you’ve been running, the more marathons you’ve done, the less that challenge becomes limiting, so that becomes standard, right?

Then there are marathon-pace runs—again, simulating what you’re going to do—but they’re tough on the body. So I think the 18-week programs each have four of those, and the 12-week programs each have three of those. And so it’s a matter of judiciously including them at the right amount so that you’re not really flattening yourself.

And then lactate threshold training, or tempo runs, because you tend to do the marathon just a couple of percent slower than lactate threshold. For at least well-trained runners, probably doing the marathon two to three percent slower than lactate threshold. That’s a pretty fine margin. So as your lactate threshold improves, your marathon pace should improve along with that.

How do you think about VO2 max intervals? They do appear in your program—they have through the last three to four editions of the book—but they’re not as specific to the demands of the event itself as everything that you just described. So how important are they, and why include them in a marathon training program if you’re not going to go that fast during the race?

Well, it depends a little bit on what you’re doing the rest of the year. So if you’re doing 5K and 10K racing and you’re hitting the VO₂ max workouts hard, you probably can do less during your marathon buildup.

The workouts we have are at 95% of VO₂ max. So they’re solid, but they’re not quite as hard as what you would do if you were specifically preparing for a shorter distance, because we want you to be able to bounce back.

So there’s the workout you’re doing today, the workouts you’re doing this week, but then what you’re accomplishing over the sustained period of 12 or 18 weeks. If you can nudge your VO₂ max up a little bit, that gives more room for your lactate threshold to go up a little bit. Your marathon pace is two or three percent slower than your lactate threshold, so it shifts everything up.

But if you put too much effort into VO₂ max, you’re going to be tired from that and have less energy left for the more important stuff.

What do you see as the biggest mistake that athletes in this population—the folks who are going to be reading this book—make in their training?

Getting obsessive. I’ll raise my hand on that, for sure.

One element, which I don’t think is such a thing anymore, is doing a lot of short intervals to get ready for a marathon. There was more of that quite a long time ago.

Overdoing it on the mileage, increasing too quickly. The body’s quite good at getting back to a level it’s done before. Say you’ve done 70 miles a week in the past, and leading up to your marathon buildup you’ve been doing 45, you can probably get back up into that 60 to 70 range pretty quick.

But if you’ve never been there, and you think, “Ah, OK, this time I’m really going to go for it, I’m going to get a 20-minute personal best in the marathon, I’m ramping it up,” well, the body is very bad at adapting quickly to more than it’s used to. So you’ve got to be judicious with that. Otherwise you can easily end up injured. So that’s probably still number one: ramping up too quickly.

Let’s talk about recovery for a minute. What are the things that you think most marathoners should be paying attention to so they know that they’re absorbing their training and not just merely tolerating it?

Well, perceived exertion. It’s very simple, but really, if you’re dragging, and if you’re honestly assessing your energy level during the day—when you wake up, during the day, and during your training—it’s going to come up pretty quickly. So you’re lying to yourself if you’re not picking that up.

We used to measure morning heart rate. I know morning heart rate isn’t a highly reliable measure, but it did seem to be of some use, particularly if you’re waking up without an alarm. And if your morning heart rate had been 48 and now it’s 55, it’s like, “Ooh, why is that?” Well, there may be something there.

Heart-rate variability, if you really understand it well—there’s just a tendency to say, “Oh, today’s high, I must be overtrained,” and to over-regulate relative to that. In terms of how to avoid that, it is really the density of the hard work. It’s the number of sessions when you’re really getting your heart rate up in a sustained way—say three days in a row, or when you look back over the last two weeks, whatever that is—that is too much for you. And it’s in the context of the rest of your life.

I appreciate you sharing that, because I do think the role of feel or perceived effort gets lost because we’re so inundated with data. That’s performance data, that’s recovery data—the number of things people can measure these days is pretty much infinite.

And I think what happens is [that] some of it can be useful, and it can show you patterns that are emerging over time, and you can act accordingly. But what I’ve observed is a lot of people end up becoming robotic about it: “Oh, my HRV dropped today, I can’t work out, I can’t go hard.” But they don’t take the time to ask themselves, “Well, how do I feel?”

I see it with athletes in workouts all the time. They’re so married to whatever the GPS is telling them, or whatever the split is, and they have to be reminded, “Well, how did that effort feel? Sure, you hit the 6-minute mile, but was it 5:45 effort, or did you feel pretty comfortable there?” And often they’ll say, “No, but I hadn’t really thought about that.”

So I think it’s just important to check in with yourself, whether it’s from the performance side of things or the recovery side of things because they’re married to each other.

Mario, if there’s one wise thing that you say all year, that was the wisest of them.

The brain is assimilating all the signals. How you feel is right—that’s how you feel. And if you think, “Oh, I’m not being tough enough on myself,” that’s probably wrong. Marathon runners who are committed—they’ve got the training schedule, they’ve got the technology, they’re working hard at it—you’re not just suddenly soft this week or today.

There’s a reason why you just can’t get yourself up to do the hard session. Forcing it almost never works. And in coaching runners—when I’d go to the track and somebody’d be off on the first interval, and then they’re a little bit more off on the second interval—well, it took a while to learn: pull out of the session, because it’s only going to get worse. They’re digging themselves a bigger hole, and rather than bouncing back in a day or two, the athlete’s going to be more tired for a longer period of time.

I think it comes down to trusting yourself. Many athletes want to put the trust in the metric and say, “All right, if it tells me the number that I’m expecting to see, then I’m good to go.”

But you have to be able to read the signals that your body is giving you. If it’s not a day that you’re feeling good, trust yourself to say, “Today’s not the day to push this workout,” as you just described. Push it back a day or two, or take the extra rest day.

Or even if you’re feeling good, to trust yourself to be like, “I feel really good today, I’m actually going to try to push it a little bit more and see what I can get out of it.” You’ve got to be careful with that, of course. But that’s one thing I’ve noticed with this proliferation of data and technology: a lot of athletes, especially newer ones who don’t have the experience, they never really learn to trust themselves.

Which—and you know this as well as anybody—when it comes down to race day, if you’re going to have the day that you want to have, you have to trust yourself to make decisions along the way. You can’t just outsource it to the watch the entire time.

That’s exactly right. Only you really, really understand how you’re feeling. And have the confidence that you’re pretty tough and you’re going to do the right thing. You’re not wimping out—you’re listening to the body. You’re adjusting and going hard when you’re tired. And it comes back to this overreaching thing, which again was my obsessive issue in writing the book for a while. You need to work hard. But when you get to that point, forcing yourself has more downside than it has upside.

You said that perceived exertion is still the gold standard over data. But you also mentioned your interest in HRV as a potentially useful tool when it comes to monitoring recovery. So if you had to give one or two practical guidelines for how to use metrics as a guide and/or reference point, and not the sole basis of making training-related decisions—e.g. when to rest, when to go hard, etc.—what would they be?

A few simple measures can provide insight into your adaptation to training. When results on these measures trend in the wrong direction, running performance typically deteriorates soon thereafter.

Muscle soreness. It is not unusual for runners to have slightly sore muscles most of the time. An increase in muscle soreness can be due to a hard workout or running downhill. Evaluate your general muscle soreness each day. Is your soreness explainable by your most recent workouts? If increased general muscle soreness lasts more than 4 or 5 days, it is likely that you are overreaching. Soreness in a specific muscle indicates a potential injury, whereas more general muscle soreness provides an indication of a lack of recovery.

Bodyweight and hydration level. Check your weight at the same time of day each day or several times per week. While weight naturally fluctuates by 1-2 pounds from day to day, decreases in weight over a few days may indicate dehydration. Decreases in weight over a few weeks can indicate that you are not eating enough calories, have an illness, or are overtraining.

Morning heart rate. Your heart rate when you first wake up provides an indication of your recovery. It is important to check your heart rate soon after you wake—and without an alarm—because it increases as soon as you start thinking about your plans for the day and by about 10 beats per minute when you get up. To find your resting heart rate, wear a smartwatch or heart rate monitor overnight or check your heart rate immediately upon waking. Establish your baseline morning heart rate across several days. If your morning heart rate is more than 5 beats per minute higher than usual, this may be an indication of inadequate recovery or may be the first sign that you are not well. Early detection can be particularly useful in preventing illness. Monitoring heart rate variability is a more sophisticated method of tracking recovery that is useful with the right level of knowledge.

Energy levels. Evaluate your energy levels daily. This is very similar to perceived exertion because if you have low energy everything feels more difficult. If your energy level is reduced for more than a few days, try to determine why. Typical causes of reduced energy levels are lack of carbohydrate intake, training hard too many days in a row, illness, low iron levels, dehydration, and lack of sleep, all of which are counterproductive to running performance.

Let’s shift gears a little bit and talk about strength training. I get this question a lot as a coach. I think a lot of newer runners—more so than ever before—they’re wondering: How does the role of strength training fit into training for a marathon? Because they’ve either heard it’s important, or they “don’t want to be a skinny runner,” whatever it happens to be. So I’m curious about your thoughts on it and how that’s evolved over the past few decades.

Yeah. It’s one of the challenges in a book like this, because when you look at what Galen Rupp was doing—he was doing serious strength training—but the people who are reading the book, again, they’re people with full-time jobs, they’re fitting the running in, and the running is time-consuming, using the energy they have.

So we try to get the strength training to be more of an injury-prevention element. Yeah, there’s an element of it to maintaining your form over the course of the marathon. But it’s far different from what a Galen Rupp would be doing, where he was actually taking the time in a very carefully constructed program to improve his performance through strength training.

We just don’t have that…I’ll say luxury. Our readers don’t have the time to focus on that. And we can’t really prioritize it without taking away from the running that’s going to be of greater benefit to them.

OK, so let me hit you with a somewhat selfish question, even though I’m not training for a marathon myself right now. But for masters runners—thinking about those who are over 40s into their 50s and beyond—I mean, we’re seeing more folks in those age groups training for performance and still trying to get faster. Some of them ran through their 20s and 30s, and there are a lot of miles on the car, so to speak. And some are newer folks who are getting into the sport later in life and they’re curious to see what they can do.

So how do you think about adapting the concepts and the plans that are in Advanced Marathoning for masters athletes, if at all?

Well, it’s more flexibility. Masters runners: You know yourself even more than the young ones know themselves, so use that knowledge.

Focus on the effective stimulus workouts. Keep the chassis working. You don’t want to be like a car that needs a front-end alignment and every mile you run, you’re just rattling yourself to bits.

So all those elements around flexibility, core strength—if you’ve got an injury, tend to it. Don’t let the two-week injury become the two-month injury. 

If super shoes are keeping the body from getting as beat up, well, that’s great. So masters runners, I hope you can afford to use super shoes a little more, because yeah, that’s going to be beneficial for you.

Avoiding the repetitive beating up of the body, keeping your body working as well as you possibly can. Scott Douglas [ed. Note: Pfitzinger’s co-author] is a great example of this. I don’t know, what is he, 60 now? Maybe. I still consider him young. He does all this stuff that 20 years ago he wrote about, but now he actually does it. He’s really working to keep his body moving, because he loves running and he wants to be able to run every day. And he just did a 5K track race—that’s pretty good for a guy his age. The body’s working. He’s just one example of many, many, many masters runners.

You mentioned flexibility, mobility, and using super shoes for Masters runners. Beyond those adjustments, what do you think is the most important mindset shift for someone in their 40s, 50s, or beyond?

The most important shift is that it is positive to modify training based on how you are feeling. You will have fewer setbacks and more quality training by adapting. Listen to your body’s signals and record how you are feeling and any adaptations you make to training. Your goal is to learn as much as you can and remember those lessons for future training and races. This approach is also helpful for younger runners, but accumulated wisdom is one of the benefits of experience and aging.

How do you think about the role of cross-training in all of this? Whether it’s for masters runners who are maybe running a little bit less than some of their younger contemporaries, or even folks who are in their 20s, 30s, 40s, but training to run a fast marathon and are afraid of getting hurt or running too much or whatever it may be?

Well, I think cross-training has a real place. Again, it’s different for elite runners, but for most runners, if you think about their recovery runs in the training program, we talk about this: the right thing for you as an individual might be to do some cross-training. That can be on an exercise bike, it can be outside on a bike, it can be using an elliptical trainer. It can be that you just have a weekly water-running session. Near where I live there are water-running sessions several times a week, and there are some people who just do that—it’s just part of what they do.

There are other people who just do it when they’re injured. So if you’ve had a tendency to be injured, great, replace it with some cross-training but try to avoid that becoming an obsession in and of itself. Again, if you feel overtired, rather than the cross-training, maybe that should just be a little bit more recovery.

Bouncing around a little bit, but just to go back to something you had talked about earlier with regard to fueling, specifically how you want to be strategic about some of those runs where you’re not necessarily taking in gels or a lot of carbohydrate during it so you can teach your body to burn fuel more efficiently. Talk to me a little bit more about that. What kind of frequency are we talking about, and what is good practice in general in terms of when and how often you should fuel your workouts versus when you shouldn’t fuel them?

I would say with your marathon-pace runs, you’re simulating, you’re practicing. So you would want to take in nutrition similar to what you want to then do in the marathon, because you’re trying to get that right. You don’t want to get to the marathon and find, “Ooh, this is too much, my gut just isn’t handling this.”

Most long runs, I would say don’t. You’re getting carbohydrate in before. Let’s say it’s a morning run. You do that morning run, you finish it, and then you want to get the carbs in and some protein shortly thereafter. But you’re then creating that stimulus, you’re bringing your carbohydrate stores down, and that’s training your body to store more glycogen in the future.

Lactate threshold tempo runs, they’re not that long, so you don’t need to take in carbs then. But they do burn a lot of carbs, so that’s good. That’s again, some partial depletion. VO2 max sessions as well, that’s some partial depletion. 

I appreciate that perspective, because I think with this—let’s just call it revolution in fueling that’s happening right now, especially for new runners who are coming into the sport and they’re consuming a lot of this information on social media—they’re, no pun intended, constantly being fed: “I need to fuel, I need to fuel, I need to fuel.”

And what a lot of people end up doing is they just take it too far to one extreme. And then all of a sudden they’re going out for an easy one-hour run: “Well, I need to make sure that I’m fueling well beforehand, and maybe I’ll pop a gel halfway.” And it’s like, no—you’re going to be fine. It’s an easy hour run. You should have enough stored fuel to get yourself through that.

But even in some of these more key sessions, such as the long runs or your basic LT run—if you’re running a 20-minute LT run or a 30-minute LT run—you probably don’t need to, and aren’t going to benefit from taking something during it.

No, I agree wholeheartedly. When you look at the website for the nutrition products, they’re selling a lot more product if people are using it all through their preparation. And so some are probably turning the dial towards, yes, it becomes several times a week, and you’re buying a lot more product. Which, there’s more questionable benefit, and actually possibly a little bit detrimental, because a little bit of the judicious use of depletion is probably helpful.

What do you see as the “sweet spot” for how often athletes should do these runs in a training cycle? And what’s the risk if they do too many?

The risk of doing too many depletion runs is slower recovery from training and an excessive amount of carbohydrate depletion runs can increase the risk of short term reduced immune function. I recommend doing 3 or 4 long runs—between 17-21 miles—and most medium long runs—up to 15 miles—without taking in carbs during the run. Start these depletion runs with normal, but not depleted, glycogen stores so you do not run low on carbs until the end of the run.

Along these lines, but slightly different topic: back to super shoes again. They’re arguably if not undoubedtly the biggest technological revolution in running in the last three decades since your book first came out. How would you advise athletes use them when they are in marathon training?

There is a benefit in that you are less beat up. That suggests: use them more often. But there’s also the question, “Don’t your legs have to gain some resilience through getting beat up?”

Actually, I was working with a marathon runner who was very good, and he did lots and lots of his training on trails. And then he ran one of the big city marathons and his legs couldn’t handle it, because they weren’t used to it.

So, as with many things, there’s a balance. But for me, I would say: marathon-pace runs, sure. Again, kind of like the fueling, it’s practice, it’s specific simulation of the marathon. So I would say, yeah, use the super shoes.

Lactate threshold workouts, sure, in some of them, use the super shoes. And of course in the race.

The shoes are also expensive, so unless you’ve got a whole lot of discretionary income, you don’t want to be using them more and just wearing them out unless there’s a real benefit. So I would limit it to those two situations.

When it comes to race day itself, how do you think about pacing strategy for the marathon? And how might it vary by course, say flat and fast versus rolling/hilly?

The best strategy for the marathon is relatively even pacing, taking into account the idiosyncrasies of the course you’ll be running. If you run much faster than your overall race pace for part of the race, you’ll use more glycogen than necessary and may even start to accumulate lactate. If you run much slower than your target race pace for part of the race, you’ll need to make up for this lapse by running faster than the most economical pace for another portion of the race.

Most runners shouldn’t try to run dead-even splits, however, because during the marathon you’ll gradually fatigue your slow-twitch muscle fibers and start to recruit more of your less economical fast-twitch A fibers to maintain your pace. Because your running economy will decrease slightly during the race, your optimal pace will be slightly reduced during the later stages of the marathon. This indicates it is wise to plan for a small amount of slowing during the later stages of the marathon. If you are well prepared, this will generally only be about 5-8 seconds per mile.

You need to modify your overall effort based on the profile of the course. If there are challenging hills during the second half, hold back slightly to ensure you can run strongly over the hills. If you use too much energy prior to the hills and run over them sluggishly and feel “flat” afterwards, you will likely lose more time than being conservative early on. On a hot day, you should also start out more conservatively and adjust your time goal accordingly.

Some runners have reported that they’re better able to hold even pace throughout the marathon when racing in super shoes. Running the marathon in super shoes may lead to less muscle damage that contributes to slowing late in the race. If you’ve run marathons in super shoes and found yourself finishing faster than in conventional shoes, you may be able to adopt a more aggressive even-splits strategy.

OK, last question for you. You’ve been very humble throughout this entire conversation, but you’re a damn good runner yourself. Back in the 1980s, you were a two-time Olympian. You did well at the New York City Marathon. I mean, I think you ran between 2:11 and 2:15 for almost all of your marathons, a very tight window. You were consistent. Looking back, what do you attribute that to? 

Thank you. Yeah, that was a long time ago. Well, I prepared specifically for the marathon. I tried to…when I look back, I overdid it.

I did a lot of 140-mile weeks. This is before super shoes. So I was beat up a lot, and depleted a lot, and did a lot of things a lot. And so if I could go back, I would fine-tune that and do more marathon-pace runs, more threshold runs, and reduce the mileage. Might even get to where I was running six days a week. Because when I think now—oh boy, I was beat up a lot of the time.

But I was always really, really ready. So the distance of the marathon was no problem. I raced a little bit conservatively, I guess, most of the time. I wouldn’t go out over my head and was able to maintain. So it was a real focus on the marathon. Yeah, that sums it up.

The second part of that, is with all this knowledge that you’ve accumulated over the past few decades since you were in your heyday as a marathoner, what else would you do differently? And, by doing things differently, how much faster do you think you could go?

That second part’s dangerous. But the first part: diet, right? My diet was terrible before I met my wife. We live in New Zealand, and the New Zealanders were eating better, I think, right from back into the ’70s, without necessarily having knowledge. But I wasn’t eating enough protein, I wasn’t thinking about eating for recovery. Those elements, we could do better.

I was definitely doing mileage for mileage’s sake some of the time. And then as the marathon would get closer, we cut that back some, and so your energy would come back. But yeah, was that necessary on the 14th marathon buildup? Probably not.

I would also do longer tempo runs and marathon pace runs—OK that’s two different things, but they are related. That would require a moderate decrease in total mileage, which would likely also be helpful. I needed to be prepared to handle 4:55 per mile pace rather than 5-minute pace and that change in training would likely no doubt have helped. 

There’s better injury-prevention knowledge now than there was then. If we did weights, we did the wrong weights. If we did flexibility, we did a few exercises that just were the traditional ones, where the knowledge now is so much better.

So yeah, I think if I was to talk to the other guys from that time, that would be a typical thing: we were beating ourselves up more than was really necessary.

Well, Pete, this has been a lot of fun. Thank you for talking marathon training with me.

Thank you, Mario. I’ve really enjoyed it. I really, really admire what you’re doing. Keep up the good work.