Magic Mike ... No, strike that ... Magic Mile

Sweep bus at the NYC Marathon
(Courtesy pheezy @ Flickr)

Even though the timelapserunner's marathon goal is to finish in the upright position, a suitable race pace must be estimated. Compete at a pace that is too slow (>16:01 min/mile) and let the Sweep Vehicle catch up with you and you'll have to board the Sweep Bus and lose the opportunity to finish. Run too fast and you run the risk of burning out before the finish and limping in, if that. The window between those two extremes is not small, but it is finite. So, estimating a reasonable pace for the day of the race is paramount.


But how to do this when one has never run a marathon before? Sure, the timelapserunner has a reasonable idea of how fast he can run much shorter distances, having run a 5K race as recently as October, 2011. Does his performance in that race provide a clue? Is there a better way of estimating a good marathon race day pace? The answer to both those questions is 'yes.'

A Magic Mile is best run on a track
(Courtesy Melbourne Personal Trainers @ Flickr)

We'll start with the second question first. Jeff Galloway provides as part of his more recent marathon training programs a technique for estimating race day pace: the Magic Mile. Galloway suggests that you run a controlled, measured mile run at several points during your marathon training program. The average of these represents your Magic Mile time which - when multiplied by 1.3 - gives a good estimate of your best pace in your future marathon.

Jeff supplies a number of caveats to be aware of when predicting your race pace: a) you actually do the required training for the marathon, b) race day conditions are favorable (≤ 60˚F), and c) you pace yourself appropriately, including taking the required walk breaks. As we'll see in an upcoming post, the timelapserunner's full training schedule will include several Magic Mile tests, so we'll have some real data to feed into Galloway's prediction engine.

Predictions for Magic Mile and marathon pace times

Though the Magic Mile concept has been tested thousands of times by students of Galloway and proven to be a reliable indicator, Jeff's race prediction tool can be made to work even if you only have data from a race at a distance other than the mile - for example, a 5K. We can get an idea of our probably marathon race pace using data from the 5K run back in October of last year. The timelapserunner's finishing time was 25:59. Using an iterative process of trial-and-error, we put Magic Mile times into the calculator until we see a 5K time of 25:59. Doing this results in a hypothetical Magic Mile time of 7:50, with a predicted marathon pace of 10:11. This will have to serve as our best information for the time being, until we produce actual Magic Mile times later during the marathon training program itself. Interesting calculations, these are - especially to us INTJs.