I was reading a book by late Yoshio Koide when I came across a line that says "joy of aiming at a sub-3 marathon". It's not phrased as "joy of running a sub-3 marathon" but as joy of aiming at it. I couldn't nail exactly why, but something about the sound of it made me want to at least give a go at it.
According to the book, there are 5 principles to achieve the goal. They are all regarding a 3-month training program leading to the actual race. They are as follows:
1) Three days a week you need to do high intensity training that puts greater stress to your legs and cardio-vascular system. The remaining three days are for active rest such as jogging. And you should set aside a whole day for complete rest.
2) You may need to train nearly 2 hours even on weekdays.
3) You are advised to set aside two weekend days for high intensity training, and at least one day should be spent on running a long distance.
4) The first 10 weeks of a 3-month period are for strength-building training, and the last 3 weeks are for conditioning.
5) In the strength-building 10-week period, you are advised to increase the level of challengingness every two weeks while in the last-phase conditioning weeks you lower the level of intensity every week.
With these five principles in mind, my tentative goal is to run a sub-3.5 marathon. And in order to achieve it, I first want to get accustomed to the average target pace of 4:58/K to run a 3:29:34 marathon, and also to another target pace of 4:45/K to run a negative-split.
To achieve the goal above, I am planning to do more of tempo runs. To be specific, when I ran 10 K, I will aim at 49:40 (24:50/5K).
When I get used to that, I then increase the distance to 15 K, and run the last 5 K @ 47:30/10 K pace, which enables me to cover that distance in 23:45.
To sum up my target time for a 15 K tempo run will be 1:13:25.
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