Scott Fauble – 80/20 Endurance

In a recent post of mine—one that, like a number of my recent posts to this blog, dealt with the subject of pacing in running—I concluded with the following observation: “A masterful pacing performance like Scott Fauble’s 2:08:52 finish at this year’s Boston Marathon, which he achieved with dead-even 1:04:26 first- and second-half splits, are as marvelous to behold as a perfect golf shot, and the science behind such feats is truly mind-blowing.”

As a writer, I am endlessly surprised by the things certain readers get hung up on, and I was more than a little surprised that a few readers got really hung up on the above-quoted sentence. One commenter labelled the statement “controversial,” adding, “No way even split in Boston is optimal.” Another asserted that “even splits may very well be the scientifically ideal way to run a race but it’s just common sense that that isn’t the case with a hilly course.”

I’d like to take this opportunity to address these criticisms, not for the sake of winning an argument but to help runners like you better understand the important skill of pacing. Now, I will concede that I probably should have given an example of masterful pacing that was less vulnerable to being challenged than Scott Fauble’s even-split Boston Marathon, especially given that my purpose in adducing this example was not to provide empirical support for my main argument but simply to convey my appreciation for the beauty of expert pacing. But I chose Scott for a reason, and I stand by my claim that his pacing performance at this year’s Boston Marathon was masterful.

What made it masterful? First, as his 5K split times throughout the race attest, Scott avoided “bad” miles—those throwaway slow miles that have an outsized negative impact on finishing times. On all marathon courses, both flat and hilly, the runners who run the fewest miles at a pace that is slower than their average pace for the race as a whole come closest to winning at the end. While it is not optimal to be rigidly consistent with pace in a topographically interesting marathon like Boston, statistical analyses of pacing data from the Boston Marathon have shown that the least consistent pacers fare the worst, not just generally but also with respect to their own historical standards, and the most consistent pacers fare the best. Scott is now the fifth-fastest American finisher of the Boston Marathon in history, and he owes it partly to his choice and ability to pace the course with remarkable consistency.

The second reason I consider Scott’s pacing execution masterful is that he moved up from 22^nd place at the halfway point of the race to 7^th place at the finish. All of the fifteen athletes Scott passed in the second half ran positive splits (meaning their second half was slower than their first), in contrast to Scott’s even splits. I’ll delve deeper into the specifics of the Boston Marathon course profile in a minute, but the point to be made here is that, when my Facebook friends say that even splits in Boston are not optimal, what they are inferring is that a positive-split pattern is preferable in this particular event because the second half of the course features more climbing and less descending than the first. But if we accept this definition of “optimal,” then the fifteen runners Scott passed in the second half of the race did it “right” and Scott did it “wrong.” Which is absurd!

The third reason I consider Scott’s pacing execution masterful is the way he finished. I know Scott well, having trained with his team for thirteen weeks in 2017. He’s as tough as they come, and can dig deeper than just about anyone else in any race. Watching his beautifully ugly stretch run down Boylston Street put a lump in my throat, for it was clear he was digging as deep as he ever had, carving himself hollow in the hope of catching one more runner (the fading Albert Korir of Kenya—another positive splitter—who finished just two seconds in front of Scott) before it was too late. Try as he might, though, Scott wasn’t really able to kick per se, or lift his pace much at all, as far as I could discern. But he didn’t lose steam either, as Korir and the fifteen runners he’d overtaken had done.

This is the part of pacing skill that can’t be measured. If thirty-plus years as a runner and twenty-plus years as a coach and student of the sport have taught me anything, it’s that, when a runner is giving absolutely everything he has to give in the last part of a marathon and he neither speeds up (much) nor slows down in relation to the entire rest of the race, that runner his paced himself masterfully.

Grab some popcorn, I’m just getting warmed up.

Now, to the course. Much is made of how much tougher the second half of the Boston Marathon course is than the first half. Too much. Both halves are net downhill, with the first 22 kilometers dropping 72 meters and the last 20.2 kilometers dropping an additional 61 meters. Both halves feature uphill portions that go against the overall altimetric trend, although the lion’s share of the elevation gain does fall in the second half. So, while the second half is indeed tougher than the first, it’s not drastically so. When I emailed Scott Fauble to request his take on Boston, he said that, for an elite male racer like him, an even-split race like the one he ran equates to a 20- to 30-second negative split on a flat course like Berlin’s or Chicago’s. In other words, for a sub-2:10 guy, the second half of Boston’s course is 20 to 30 seconds slower than the first. That’s it.

I think most of Scott’s fellow elite Boston veterans would agree with this assessment, and if they’re right, then given what we know about optimal pacing in flat marathons, running even splits in Boston is in fact optimal. History shows us that, on a flat marathon course, a 20- to 30-second negative splint tends to yield the best final result among elite racers. The current men’s world record of 2:01:39 was set by Kenya’s Eliud Kipchoge in Berlin in 2018. He covered the first half of that race in 1:01:06 and the second half in 1:00:03, a 33-second negative split. Logic tells us that if a 20- to 30-second negative split is optimal in flat marathons for elite racers, and if a 20- to 30-second negative split in a flat marathon is equivalent to even splits at Boston, then even splits must be close to optimal in Boston, at least for top finishers.

By now my Facebook friends are beginning to sweat a little. “One example doesn’t make a pattern!” Fair point. Even most elites run positive splits in Boston. But most elites run positive splits in every major marathon, including flat ones. That’s because most elites race for position, not for time. They stay with the lead pack as long as they can and then they blow up. Or not. The most successful elite performances in Boston, as in every other major marathon, follow an even-split or a slight negative-split pacing pattern. Forget Scott Fauble. Geoffrey Mutai’s Boston Marathon course record of 2:03:02, which I witnessed from the media center back in 2011, resulted from splits of 1:01:57 and 1:01:05. The women’s winner that year, Caroline Kilel, split 1:11:30 and 1:11:06. Even in the rare year when a runner solos to victory off the front, as Meb Keflezighi did in 2014, we see the same pattern. Meb’s splits that year were 1:04:26 and 1:04:21.

Growing desperate, my Facebook friends move the goalposts, pointing out that what’s true for elite runners isn’t necessarily true for other runners. Scott himself expressed a similar caution in our email exchange, writing, “I don’t think you should take any lessons from a pro race on pacing.” But whereas Scott was talking about the difference between racing for position and racing for time, my Facebook friends, in their desperation, are suggesting that even splitting is unrealistic in Boston for nonelite runners.

I know from personal experience that this suggestion is baloney. I ran my first Boston Marathon in 2009, covering the first half in 1:19:45 and the second half in 1:59:25, finishing in 3:18:10. Oops. When I ran my fourth and final Boston Marathon ten years later, I’d figured out the race and gotten a lot better at pacing marathons generally. My splits on that occasion were 1:27:25 and 1:26:43, and I finished in 2:54:08. Hooray for me. But that’s not my point. My point is that I’m not Caroline Kilel or Meb Keflezighi—there’s nothing special about me. Any runner who is well prepared and who understands the course can pace Boston similarly and reach the finish line quicker for it.

When I asked Scott Fauble if he could have done anything differently pacing-wise in the 2022 Boston Marathon that might have gotten him to the finish line quicker, his short answer was “probably not.” His longer answer was this: “I could have gone out faster. But the danger of that in Boston is because the second half is harder you’re risking losing a disproportionate amount of time on the hills if you go over the line. And more specifically, at Boston the last 5 miles are some that you absolutely have to take advantage of so I think it’s better to hold back and make sure you still have your legs coming home.”

This, folks, is what it means to understand Boston and how to run it! My Facebook friends’ take on the race is far less nuanced. It’s basically, “First half easy. Second half hard. Even split impossible.” But where these guys see only black and white, Scott and I see shades of gray. Take Heartbreak Hill. Despite the scary name, that thing is little more than a glorified speed bump, rising 91 feet over half a mile. If not for its placement in mile 21, it wouldn’t scare anyone. Sure, it doesn’t feel like a speed bump on tired legs, but only runners who don’t come prepared or who don’t heed Scott Fauble’s advice to “hold back” are slowed much by it. In 2011, Geoffrey Mutai’s fastest 5K split of the entire race (14:12) came between 30 and 35 km, a segment of the course that covers three of the four biggest climbs, including Heartbreak. Not only was Mutai not slowed down by those ascents, he sped up on them! And again, you don’t have to be Geoffrey Mutai to glide over these hummocks. In 2019, I covered mile 21 in 6:42, just 4 seconds slower than my pace for the race as a whole.

It’s beyond the scope of a single blog post to say everything there is to say about pacing the Boston Marathon, or pacing marathons more broadly, or pacing in general. My modest goal here is to impress upon you how much more subtle and nuanced is the art of pacing than folks recognize. Squinty eyes see only dyads: fast/slow, hard/easy, up/down, first part/last part. The reality of pacing is far more textured, in multiple dimensions—kinesthetic, perceptual, affective, cognitive. My message to you is this: If you want to find yourself walking up Heartbreak Hill, listen to my Facebook friends. But if you want to finish your next race, and the one after that, and the one after knowing you couldn’t possibly have done any better, as Scott Fauble did at the 2022 Boston Marathon, then do yourself a favor and read my full take on this important topic, ON PACE: Discover How to Run Every Race At Your Real Limit. Or read this free sample chapter and then decide if I know what I’m talking about.

I enjoy seeing any sport performed at an elite level—even golf, which I’ve never played. When I tune into a television broadcast of a professional golf tournament I am amazed by the players’ control of the ball. If a caddie tells a player they’re 185 yards from the flag on their second shot of a par-four hole, chances are the player will hit the ball very close to 185 yards.

But how? Not by performing any conscious mathematical calculations, that’s for sure. Although knowing the distance to the flag is vital to hitting the ball the right distance, the rest is done entirely without mental arithmetic. Nor are external instruments involved in controlling the distance of a golf shot. If I asked you to drive your car 10.23 miles, you would succeed in driving precisely this distance by monitoring the vehicle’s trip odometer. But golfers do not rely on anything like an odometer to hit the ball a desired distance. Instead, the whole process is governed kinesthetically, which is to say, by using the subjective feelings of joint rotations and muscle contractions to manipulate the external environment.

In other words, when a caddie tells a golfer to hit the ball 185 yards, the golfer executes what feels like a 185-yard swing. A novice golfer has no sense of what a 185-yard swing feels like, and cannot perceive the kinesthetic difference between a swing that sends the ball 185 yards and one that sends it 175 or 195 yards. But through heavy repetition, golfers develop a more and more refined and accurate sense of what a swing of any given distance feels like, and develop a more and more precise ability to execute a swing that feels—and is—right. And the more gifted the player is in the areas of kinesthetic awareness and body control, the faster this learning process unfolds.

It all seems like magic to those of us who either don’t play golf or suck at it, but we all have some capacity for this kind of learning. Suppose I ask you to execute a 42 percent contraction of your left biceps. Electromyogram (EMG) sensors will allow us to measure how close you get to 42 percent of maximal contraction force on your first try. Let’s say you overshoot the mark, and are informed by the technician leading the test that you performed a 65 percent contraction. On your second try, you will consciously execute a contraction that feels somewhat less forceful than the first, and in this way you’ll get closer to the mark. With further practice, you could execute a contraction that’s very close to 42 percent of maximal—or any other percentage—every time.

In running, pacing is analogous to distance control in golf and to muscle contraction force accuracy in the hypothetical test just described. It’s just one more way of controlling one’s body in space to achieve a performance goal. To achieve the goal of completing a given race distance in the least time possible, a runner must be able to accurately tune their effort to the highest level that is sustainable for the full race distance. Just as a golfer must be able to feel what a 185-yard swing feels like, a runner must be able to feel whether they are running at the fastest pace they can sustain for the remaining distance of a race.

In my experience, most runners don’t recognize how similar pacing is to other sports skills that involve linking kinesthetic perception to objective performance. That’s one reason I wrote On Pace: Discover How to Run Every Race at Your Real Limit—the debut release from 80/20 Publishing. The other reason I wrote an entire book on run pacing is that, in addition to not fully understanding what pacing really is, most runners don’t fully appreciate the importance of pacing skill.

The way I see it, there are two ways to be good at running. One is to have the physical ability to sustain a fast pace over a long distance, which comes from innate talent and proper training. The second way to be good at running is to be good at pacing. Understandably, we runners tend to focus on physical fitness, but when you think about it, fitness is nothing more than potential. To fully realize their potential, runners must pace themselves perfectly, and perfect pacing is rare and difficult. As a coach, I place great emphasis on pacing skill development, and it pays. Runners who embrace the process see significant progress and enjoy themselves along the way, and you can too, by reading On Pace, which teaches the pacing skill development program I use with my clients.

Pacing is also just plain fascinating, in my opinion. A masterful pacing performance like Scott Fauble’s 2:08:52 finish at this year’s Boston Marathon, which he achieved with dead-even 1:04:26 first- and second-half splits, are as marvelous to behold as a perfect golf shot, and the science behind such feats is truly mind-blowing. I explain this science in simple terms in On Pace, making the book as entertaining (I hope) as it is edifying and useful.

Interested in learning more? Click here for a free sample chapter of On Pace, and here to purchase a copy.

On October 3, 2018, runnerworld.com published an article titled, “Galen Rupp: American Record Could Go Down in Chicago.” In its ninth paragraph, after providing some background on the existing American record for the marathon and Rupp’s buildup to the 2018 Chicago Marathon, writer Sarah Lorge Butler hedged, “To be clear, Rupp says, he’d rather win in Chicago than run a record and lose.” When I read the article, I thought nothing of this remark, accepting Rupp’s attitude as a given in a top professional distance runner, not to mention the defending champion of the Chicago Marathon. But at the bottom of the page I discovered a reader comment that made my mouth fall open: “He would rather win in a slow time then [sic] get the American record and lose? Seems like he has his priorities backwards.”

Prior to October 3, 2018, I had wondered often whether professional running and amateur running were even the same sport. This comment, insofar as it is representative of amateur thinking, confirmed for me that, in fact, they are not.

Imagine a basketball star saying before an important game, “As long as I score the most points, I don’t care if the team loses.” You can’t, can you? And that’s because everyone knows that the fundamental point of a basketball game is to win! Why should running be any different?

What many amateur runners fail to consider is that before the advent of modern timekeeping, all running races were very small—limited to a handful of participants, and often just two (match races). Mass participation made no sense in the days before races were timed. If you did not have a legitimate chance of winning, there was absolutely no point in lining up. But timed mass-participation running events been around have long enough now that runners who are too slow to win and thus care only about their times have forgotten that nothing has changed for those runners who do have a legitimate chance to win competitions like the Chicago Marathon. The point of racing remains to win.

There’s nothing wrong with running for time. The pros care too, albeit secondarily, and as an amateur runner myself, racing for time is mainly what I do. But what isa problem is that, because professional runners and amateur runners operate in separate bubbles, the latter don’t learn much from the former and consequently rely on inferior methods in their pursuit of improvement. While the typical elite runner does 80 percent of her training at low intensity, eats a high-carb diet, and does functional strength training, the typical amateur runner does 50 percent of his training at moderate intensity, eats a low-carb diet, and either doesn’t strength train or does CrossFit.

As an endurance sports coach, nutritionist, and writer, I consider it my mission to bring elite practices to the masses, because they work better than the alternatives, whether you’re fast or slow, and whether you race to win or race for time. That’s my one and only shtick. This is why I’m so jazzed about Ben Rosario and Scott Fauble’s new book, Inside a Marathon. Ben is the coach of the Northern Arizona Elite professional running team, Scott one of its members, and their book offers a fascinating peek behind the veil that divides our sport’s elite and recreational chambers. It weaves together the journals that coach and athlete kept separately while Scott trained for the 2018 New York City Marathon, where Scott finished seventh (second American) in a PR time of 2:12:28. It also includes detailed training logs and superb color photos taken by Ben’s wife, Jen.

It works on every level. You can read it as a story, experiencing the highs and lows Ben and Scott experience as they work together toward the big climax. But you can also read it from your perspective as a self-interested runner who doesn’t give a crap how Scott fares in the Big Apple and cares only your own running. What you’ll see when you do is that preparing for and executing a successful marathon at the sport’s highest level is really one big exercise in problem solving, and the key to success is making good decisions all along the way.

One of my favorite chapters is Chapter 18, titled “Two Beaten Down, Exhausted Skeletons.” It deals with a point in Scott’s training when he is riding the fine line of overtraining. Halfway through a workout that is not going well, Ben pulls Scott aside and suggests he bail out. Scott protests, and after an honest and open exchange between the two men, they compromise. Scott does the next part of the workout and then calls it a day, skipping the last part. They both feel good about the decision and the ensuing days and weeks validate it as the right call.

This stuff is pure gold—a living example to all runners striving to “solve the problem” of getting faster. If you’re looking for a good running-related book to read, you can do no better than Inside a Marathon. It will not only entertain you but also influence you, so that a year from now you may find yourself doing the very same sport the pros do.

Order your copy of Inside a Marathon here and grab a copy of our 80/20 books on this page.

During the 13 weeks I spent training with the NAZ Elite professional running team in Flagstaff last summer, I did a few workouts with Sarah Crouch, not a member of the team but an accomplished pro with a 2:32 marathon on her resume. During a couple of these sessions, it was apparent to both of us that Sarah was working harder (i.e., suffering more) than I was, which seemed odd to me because my goal was to run 2:39 at the Chicago Marathon, whereas Sarah hoped to run 10 minutes faster. Any knowledgeable observer of these workouts who knew nothing about Sarah’s and my respective backgrounds and ambitions would have predicted that I would beat her in Chicago, but in fact she beat me by 63 seconds, and would have finished even farther ahead of me if she hadn’t run the first half in 1:16:00 and then cratered.

Afterward, I couldn’t help but wonder: Is Sarah just plain tougher than I am? Is it possible that she is able to do more with similar physical capacity because she is able to run harder and push closer to her limit? Although I like to think of myself as one tough sonofabitch on the racecourse, I couldn’t dismiss this hypothesis, in part because I had no better explanation and in part because I’ve seen a good deal of evidence that elite endurance athletes are exceptionally tough mentally. Indeed, their next-level toughness is one of the reasons they’re elite.

Some of this evidence is scientific. In a fascinating 1981 paper published in the British Medical Journal, Stirling University psychologists Karel Gisbers and Vivien Scott reported finding that pain tolerance was higher in elite swimmers than in club swimmers and higher in club swimmers than in noncompetitive swimmers. More recently, a team of researchers that included my friend Samuele Marcora found that professional road cyclists scored significantly higher than recreational cyclists on a test of inhibitory control, or the ability to resist immediate temptations (such as the desire to slow down or stop to avoid the suffering of hard exercise) in favor of staying focused on a long-term goal (such as getting to the finish line in the least amount of time possible).

Other evidence of the superior mental toughness of elite endurance athletes is anecdotal. If you spend a lot of time interacting with both elite and nonelite endurance athletes, as I have done, you notice a clear difference in how the two groups (with some individual exceptions, of course) view the pain that their sport inflicts. Elite athletes tend to embrace the pain, or at least accept it. As NAZ Elite member Scott Fauble said in the documentary film 183.4, “I can put myself super deep into this well [of pain]. This is something I’ve known from a young age I was good at. As I’ve kept exploring deeper and deeper for longer and longer periods of time, I’ve just found more and more space there to be myself and live. That is a place where I am at home.”

By contrast, recreational endurance athletes tend to fear and resist pain. For them it is a problem to be avoided, wished away, and at most tolerated, but only up to a point, whereas for the elites it is information and an integral part of the racing (and training) experience. The title of this article is taken from a famous quote from Percy Cerutty, a legendary Australian running coach from the mid-20^th century, who often harangued his athletes with the phrase, “Faster, it’s only pain!” as he stood trackside watching them suffer.

If you want to be as mentally tough as the elites, your first step is to recognize the deep truth hidden in Cerutty’s directive. Pain is not proof that you can’t go faster, nor evidence that you’ve reached your physical limit. It’s an illusion. You can go faster. All you have to do is try, and accept the extra pain that comes with it.

These ideas are explored in depth in Alex Hutchinson’s new book Endure, which I haven’t read yet but is next on my list. Based on the extensive writing Alex has already done on this subject, though, I do not hesitate to encourage you to check it out. I’ll share some thoughts about it in this space after I’ve gone through it.

But if you want to read other books related to marathon, go here.

Newsletter

Get Started

Connect

Quick Links