Last month Patrick George dropped over 10-minutes off his previous best (3:00:17) at the Richmond Marathon. His official time of 2:49:58 earned him a BQ and 42nd place overall. [Full Results]
Patrick shares how reading Daniels’ Running Formula has transformed his running…
This training cycle began in earnest last October, as I geared up for a spring half-marathon with the perennial go-to Daniels’ Running Formula. That half, 1:22:35, earned me a spot on the Air Combat Command team for the Air Force Major Command Challenge at the Air Force Marathon in September, competing in the half.
At this point, given how well I had done on my own with the book, I decided to contact Coach Daniels and Run SMART. The plan couldn’t have gone better for me and couldn’t have been more worthwhile. I remember the wide-eyed look on my face when I first received it, noting how daunting some of even the early workouts seemed. Week after week, however, I saw slow and steady improvement.
Politically and personally, I describe myself as a pragmatic incrementalist. This plan embodied and epitomized that more clearly than anything else in my life. I subscribe to Training Peaks, and was amazed to see the staircase-like improvement in my Chronic Training Load, my basic fitness, over the past 18 weeks. I thank you and your team from the bottom of my heart. I absolutely could not have done this without the plan and the faith it implied in my abilities.
As one last humble-brag meant as praise, I thank you, your team, and Coach Daniels for emphasizing, in various books, posts, articles, the importance of negative or even splits. My first 10k was 41:16. My last was 39:00. Hell, my fastest mile was my last, running 5:38 from 25.2 to 26.2, which was, admittedly, downhill.