Running Through It: Kellyn Taylor’s Breakthrough Marathon
I talk about NAZ Elite runner Kellyn Taylor’s recent Breakthrough at Grandma’s marathon on this week’s episode of my Podcast, Running Through It. She dropped 4 minutes off her marathon PR and 2 minutes off the course record. Kellyn’s Coach, Ben Rosario, is a friend of mine and one of my primary coaching mentors; so I asked him about Kellyn’s training.
It’s extremely fascinating to me, especially given that Kellyn’s initial goal race this training cycle was to prepare for Boston. I asked for Ben’s thoughts before Boston this year:
Before Boston I asked my friend/mentor @BenRosario1 about @kellyn_taylor and her current fitness level, he said “Kellyn is absolutely, 100% the fittest she’s ever been and the most prepared she’s ever been for a marathon.” Coach is always right @GrandmasMara @NAZ_Elite #runchat
— Justin Horneker (@hornekerjustin) June 18, 2018
So given that she was in really great shape pre-Boston, and given how the conditions in Boston made it impossible to run at your peak performance level I was interested in how Ben pushed the right buttons in Kellyn’s training to run a massive pr 8 weeks later.
I reached out to Ben again and the full response is included in my podcast embedded below. The gist of his response was this: the training never leaves you completely and given the amount of tempo and marathon pace work they did in the Boston build up… they touched on a lot more 10k pace work in their build-up to Grandma’s. You never lose the miles in training but you can definitely hammer the long grinding workouts too much and overcook. However that’s where the change in pace and the change in workouts comes in, every training cycle will be different than the last and each goal race will require a new set of workouts to harvest peak training.
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Happy Running,
-Justin
