I wanted to do a little debrief on my marathon experience and expand on this thought that technique carries everything. If you didn’t read my post on my marathon preparation scroll down a couple of posts. I was so excited about the marathon (no idea why, but I just was) that I didn’t end up getting to bed till 11pm and had to get up again at 3:15am to get ready and catch the 4:20am ferry. Didn’t think about this till after the marathon but 4hours 15min sleep is probibly not ideal…
After eating 3 slices of left over pizza from the night before and sculling a litre of water I was in the car and on the way to the ferry. At the start line people were quiet, probibly nervous but no one looked happy or excited thats for sure. It was a beautiful morning and we took off at 6am as the sun was rising. Running over the harbour bridge and looking at our awesome city was magical – I loved it. When I passed the 22km mark in the city I felt as fresh as when I started. Now this is a big deal for me because 4 years ago (just before starting CrossFit) I ran my first half marathon and completely blew out at the 18km mark and had to walk the last 3km.
From the 22km mark onwards my legs got heavier and heavier and by the time I got to St Helliers (10km to go from memory) I thought that I might be in trouble… my running technique started going and I could feel myself running less and less efficient with every step (I call this leakage – more on this later…). Not sure if it was seeing Stephen Buckley on the decks DJ’ing his heart out, the flat Coke or the jelly beans but I managed to keep moving and when Belinda and China joined us for the final 2km we managed to pick up the pace from 6:30min/km to 4:30min/km and snuck in just under 4 hours at 3:58 (my main man Dharmesh finishing in 3:57). A big thanks to Belinda and China!
After this marathon I’m even more convinced that TECHNIQUE has to come first regardless of the exercise modality. Technique is what carries performance. Its the package that keeps things in shape, tight, compact and efficient (and injury free). Wether it is strength in the deadlift, power in the olympic lifts or endurance in running, it has to be wrapped and contained in technique. I see this in the gym everyday, people that have all the natural strength, power, speed or cardiovascular endurance that get out performed by individuals that have less of the above but have more efficient technique and therefor execute better, safer and with less leakage.
This concept of leakage that I keep referring to is when, what you have naturally, or have gained through hard work does not fully get expressed or gets wasted through inefficient technique or lack of skill. A prime example of this is when an athlete who can deadlift 200kg and front squat 150kg cant land a 100kg clean. He or she (a very strong she) has all the strength it takes to perform a 100kg clean but lacks the skill and technique to put the clean together. Now I know this is different to running but I truly believe weather it is a tennis serve, a olympic lift or a marathon you have to package the capacity (endurance or power or strength or speed) in skill and technique to get the ideal outcome.
So here is my conclusion. I think I had just enough cardiovascular capacity and muscular endurance (gained not by running but by high intensity anaerobic workouts in the gym everyday) to complete a marathon. If I wanted to do a faster time I needed to do a lot more running (but not as much as most programs suggest :-). Because I’ve put a lot of work in to my running technique through drills, filming, adjusting and shorter intervals since doing the CrossFit Endurance certification two years ago there wasn’t much leakage (until the 30km mark when the muscular endurance was leaking all over the place) and that carried me without a doubt! If my running still looked the way it did in that first half marathon 4 years ago I’m certain I would have blown out around the 25-30km mark.
Out of the 4 hours of running I reckon about 2 hours of mind space would have been taken up by evaluating runners in front me and their running technique. I was thinking how strength training could really help some of them and that if more time was spent on tightening the ‘package’ (technique and skill) that holds their hard earned fitness, not only would they run faster but they would have less injury!
Finally, spending time drilling technique and skill is not an excuse to avoid the hard yards! To gain capacity in any area of health and fitness you have to work hard, really really hard. To get stronger you have to put weight on the bar. To get more powerful you have to learn to move faster with load. To increase your muscular endurance you have to get out and run. To get flexible you have to spend time in stretched positions. But all of this gets expressed so much better when its tightly packaged in TECHNIQUE AND SKILL and there is minimal leakage, even under fatigue.
If you’re keen to find out more about CrossFit Endurance check out the site here: http://crossfitendurance.com/ and perhaps even consider doing the certification when it come here next.
I’m never running that far again.
Wykie
