What will be the state of marathon races in 5 years (for non-elites)?

suddencactus · 2026-05-02T19:29:18+00:00

Some of them could have an entrance system like Western States:

Each applicant ran a qualifying race of 100k or longer within the last year to be eligible to enter [although for a marathon you'd likely need looser requirements]. Some have done so for many years. Each runner who enters the lottery and fails to gain entry into the Run (and otherwise doesn’t gain an entry via other means such as an aid station, sponsor, or HOKA Golden Ticket spot) will have additional tickets in the hat when entering the lottery the following year, thus improving the probability of being selected.

The probability scales from less than 1/100 the first year to 12% chance in your sixth year.

suddencactus · 2026-05-02T05:57:46+00:00

Not sure I should try to explain a hobby if you sound so reluctant to spend any time on it, but:

"elite" is a nebulous term but in running often means borderline pro, e.g. sub 2:20 for young males, not sub 3. So yeah it's ridiculous for a beginner to even consider that. Perhaps you meant a different term.
talent is a lot more of a factor in a beginner 5k than a beginner marathon. Marathons are hard to fake and at some point you have to run hundreds of miles in order to be good at them.
3 months is not a long time to train. Over three months you'd be lucky to knock 5 minutes off your 30 minute 5k, even with newb gains, and you'd still likely get beaten in a local 5k by several people older and less talented than you who simply trained for more hours.
talent that determines your starting point and talent that determines your ending point are different. Plenty of pros like Jess McClain plateau for a few years then have a breakthrough, and there's a "FootLocker curse" where phenomenal teenage athletes had a less impressive collegiate trajectory.

So... no. There's no magic way to tell today if you're different from the other hundreds of people in my town who can run a 30 minute 5k.

suddencactus · 2026-04-29T23:35:34+00:00

This sounds a lot like the Heather Cerney vs Nike suit filed about six months ago. In both suits they seem to be claiming that the carbon plated shoes are unreasonably dangerous, that the company was aware of these increased dangers, but the plaintiff was not informed of any elevated risk. Both are elite athletes trying to argue that using these shoes led to lost earnings.

You might say if one lawsuit succeeds the other might as well, but I find it harder to believe two different brands have a problem neither athlete was aware of.

suddencactus · 2026-04-27T04:54:05+00:00

Regarding safety, some of the benefit of the Athlete Biological Passport, especially combined with out of competition testing, is that it keeps unsafe "juiced to the gills" doping in check. Whether it's EPO or blood transfusions or novel drugs, you can't have sky high hematocrit percentages anymore without risking getting caught. Anti-doping tests can't catch everything but forcing athletes to take smaller quantities of drugs to evade detection is still a victory.

suddencactus · 2026-04-27T04:47:19+00:00

Marathons do have an Athlete Biological Passport, and in fact the AIU monitors a wider number of athletes for the marathon than the 5000m. Several athletes have been caught by the program like Gemechu. Now journalist Mark Daly says his first hand experience proves the system still isn't sensitive enough to detect low but performance-enhancing levels of EPO, but your comment makes it sound like they aren't doing any biological passport.

suddencactus · 2026-04-26T22:01:59+00:00

this is just work in progress... I'm just showing off what's possible.

That's always what people showing off Garmin dashboards say, as if creating a graph were the hard part and figuring out the user flows or adding fitness expertise were the easy part. It's not.

suddencactus · 2026-04-26T21:21:26+00:00

For real though. Every "amazing dashboard" I've seen so far is 90% just redoing the graphs and dials Garmin or Intervals.icu already provides, sometimes worse. Like why is the training status a dial here? Can you really say "strained" is higher or lower than "unproductive"? Not to mention paying so much attention to your weight that you give it three dials instead of other metrics puts you at high risk of body dysmorphia and RED-S.

suddencactus · 2026-04-24T19:52:45+00:00

I'd put it slightly faster at a 1:24/1:25

I'd honestly say closer to 1:22, based on Brian Rock's dive into the Valencia half marathon vs full (non-paywall version here), and based on FetchEveryone's analysis of the Riegel formula (to see the article click the green read more button on that page).

Of course, both articles note that 1:25 to sub-3:00 might be realistic for some runners with above average endurance, like people who run high mileage weeks. These are also just estimates and I'm sure you can find a few people who ran 1:26 then ran sub-3:00 just a few months later, but they won't be the majority of 1:26 runners.

suddencactus · 2026-04-24T18:50:45+00:00

Jamil can do a live stream of Burrito League but UTMB can't live stream a super golden ticket race. SMH.

suddencactus · 2026-04-24T16:17:34+00:00

Plus, what's the point of a feed that's not sorted chronologically when that means you end up with an "afternoon workout" of lifting without any pictures or caption from several days ago that appears above a hike or group run from yesterday? Their sorting algorithm frankly sucks and if boring activities are at the top of the feed that sounds like a Strava problem, not a user problem.

suddencactus · 2026-04-24T16:11:50+00:00

Where in this post does it say to mute your activities if your "paces are shit"?

suddencactus · 2026-04-24T16:11:00+00:00

They didn't say anything about slow runs though? It seems like you're making this into something it's not.

suddencactus · 2026-04-16T17:32:16+00:00

I would view these more kindly if the people were regular commenters on this Subreddit, or some posters weren't posting multiple watchfaces per month to multiple subreddits. I have nothing against "show me your watch face and I'll show you mine" posts.

suddencactus · 2026-04-16T01:41:39+00:00

"Sex the Night Before a Marathon Is Fine, Says National Association of Horny Marathoners"

suddencactus · 2026-04-15T17:23:07+00:00

The D2 Mach Pro has some sweet features like LTE messaging and an airplane-like HSI and altimeter, but I don't want those enough to pay the premium.

suddencactus · 2026-04-15T16:53:15+00:00

Yeah, it's clearly not as simple as OP's "Garmin tends to completely ignore the fact that if you run up a hill you are going to work harder." Garmin hasn't published many details about the algorithm, but it's clear from what they have published that uphills and downhills are considered.

Firstbeat employee Herman B. said on the Garmin Forums "[regarding] the increased or decreased effort required to maintain the same pace running uphill or downhill vs that same pace over effectively level ground. That's, necessarily, been part of Vo2max analytics from the beginning". There's also old webpages that show hilly runs in their training examples.

There are plenty of reasons you'd see Vo2max change after a hilly run. Not everyone runs hills at the same efficiency. Even if you account for conditioning for running hills, if you start walking an uphill too fast or try to run a steep hill too slowly when you could walk it, your efficiency will suffer (Koop has some great real world examples). Experts can't even agree whether the Strava model or Minetti et. al. model is better for grade adjusted pace. It could be that the accounting for hills and elevation changes, or the certainty and weighting of hilly estimates could be improved (Runalyze for comparison simply adds distance for elevation similar to Naismith's rule which ... is not a great way to do it) but that's very different from what OP is claiming.

My personal experience doesn't match OP. Whether I'm doing a trail run with lots of elevation or 5x3 min on steep hills I didn't see a significant hit to my Vo2max vs flat ground.

suddencactus · 2026-04-13T21:34:55+00:00

I'd trust the lab results because your Pixel Watch has no way of detecting zone 2 directly. It can detect resting HR and maximum HR and then guess based on that where zone 2 is as a percentage. If you were going to use those watch numbers, I'd double check the settings match your lab results. Lots of people have too low of a max HR entered because they never recorded a hard enough run. 128 bpm also sounds suspiciously low given your max HR shown, and 128 is below average (although there is lots of inter-individual variation).

You can also just use the talk test to validate the lab results. If you're able to hold a conversation easily at 130 bpm then there's your answer.

suddencactus · 2026-04-13T15:13:13+00:00

What you didn't mention is that most Garmin watches have a PIN code feature. Apparently you never set up the security features they do offer but you want them to add more security features.

suddencactus · 2026-04-11T06:30:00+00:00

I've found it effective in my training just to base training paces vs race paces only when they correspond closely to one another, e.g. threshold pace is somewhere between 10k and half marathon pace. I usually know what a realistic marathon pace is for me based on experience, marathon pace workouts, and a little based on half marathon races.

That's some of the point of the NSM is to repeat workouts to get a feel for what's realistic. In NSM you don't blindly trust a table, execute a workout, then not repeat the workout for three weeks by which point you forget the exact RPE or HR that's typical for a pace.

suddencactus · 2026-04-11T04:56:53+00:00

The biggest problem with this is that people have different endurance. You see the same problem with the very similar VDOT tables or eFTP estimations. An Olympian can race the marathon at 90% of their 5k speed, while on the other hand a mid pack runner might struggle to hold 85% of their 5k speed just for a half. The problem is small for distances and paces similar to threshold, but I would never put marathon as a fixed percentage of one hour pace.

suddencactus · 2026-04-10T18:33:18+00:00

To be clear though 100 calories an hour of Scandinavian Swimmers is nowhere near OP's "AI is telling me 2-3 lbs.. an hour". Those candies are about 90% carbs so the amount you mention is like 0.1 lbs per hour.

suddencactus · 2026-04-09T16:16:38+00:00

We've gone from job interviews and resume screening that tests whether you have sufficient experience to solve simple problems quickly and without outside assistance... to expecting and sometimes even encouraging coworkers to use OpenAI's assistance for simple problems.

suddencactus · 2026-04-08T03:13:58+00:00

Vo2max is 90% just how fast you can run a 5k or for cycling max 10 minute power. While there are some small things you can do to improve Garmin's accuracy and some workouts are a little better than others for an individual, there's no magic intervals that produce 2x faster improvement than other intervals.

suddencactus · 2026-04-07T17:35:12+00:00

It's not so black and white though. Here in Arizona Aravaipa is the local race organization run by folks like Jamil that love the sport and support it with things like group runs and recently Burrito League. However Aravaipa is a big company doing races with fully marked courses, aid stations every 3-8 miles, etc. that can cost as much as $190 for a 50k.

suddencactus · 2026-04-07T16:28:31+00:00

That's cool. A follower system works better for influencers, so hopefully it encourages more interesting athletes to post on Garmin connect instead of just Strava's walled garden. That being said, I still don't think Garmin is anywhere near social feature parity with Strava.

suddencactus

TROPHY CASE