Thursday, June 7, 2007

Parrott Predictor



Parrots from http://groups.msn.com/DigitalArtBoard/tutorialslisting.msnw


No, a Parrott Predictor has nothing to do with birds estimating your running performance. From the running log spreadsheet I use (which I cannot for the life of me recall where I downloaded it from) the Parrott Predictor is described as follows:

"George Parrott, known affectionately as "Coach George" on the Dead Runners Society listserve, presented this idea a couple of years ago. He suggests that a runner can run no faster in the Marathon than he runs his fastest 26.2 miles in a week during training."

Now that I have surpassed 26.2 miles in a single week, my Predictor tool is predicting.

For the first week of January (when I ran the Disney Marathon) the Parrott Predictor had me running a marathon in no more than 5:38:11 (my actual chip time was 5:47:27 - pretty close considering the heat that day - although 26.2 of those miles were the actual marathon).

For the week starting May 21st, when I ran 28.3 total miles, the Parrott has my best marathon time at 5:04:12.

For the week starting May 28th, when I ran 29.9 total miles, the Parrott has my best time at 4:52:44.

I'm thinking a 5 hour marathon might be in my grasp!! Raaawwwwk!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Train fast, run fast

I've seen that concept before but never looked into, plus it has a "pessimistic" view to me. "Can run no faster..."

I much rather prefer the Yasso approach which the time one can run successive 800m repeats should predict your marathon time.

It tells me not what I can't do, but what I am capable of doing or better!

Petraruns said...

woohoo - I've just taken a log at your training log - you really are doing that cross training bit very seriously aren't you? well done!