 Many of you will have seen my recent Paris marathon video. If you haven't, then you can click up there and watch it now and then don't forget to come back here. And I managed to break my PB in the Paris marathon, getting 255. My previous PB was set at Goodwood in 2020, in which I got 258 something. And I thought today what we'd do, I know it's not many people's cup of tea, but if you like your stats, I thought we'd go over the differences in the training block between my Goodwood marathon training block and my Paris marathon training block to see what the difference was. Where did I gain those extra three minutes? So let's jump right into the spreadsheet. And you can see I've got two sets of data here, one from Goodwood and one from Paris. And I've broken it down into a 13 week training block. Now that's just a kind of estimation. The Paris marathon training block was around about 13 weeks. But for the Goodwood marathon, I had been training quite a lot before then for other races as well. So I came into the Goodwood training block with quite a lot of mileage already behind me, regular 100 kilometer training weeks. Whereas with Paris, I came in after a long break, a big hiatus of big mileage. So from back the summer onwards, I reduced my mileage. And then certainly from November and December, I was doing very little mileage. So when I came into the training block in January, I was pretty much fresh starting a new block. So let's start with distance. And you can see in the spreadsheet that for Goodwood, my distance overall was 1,548 kilometers over the period of 13 weeks training. And that averaged out at around about 119 kilometers per week. Whereas for the Paris marathon training block, I did significantly less mileage, 1,409 kilometers in total. And that worked out at around about 108 kilometers per week. So a good 10 kilometers per week less for the Paris marathon training block. In terms of time spent running, again, I did more time on my feet for the Goodwood training block 13 weeks. And the total was about 150 hours of running, which worked out around about 11 and a half hours per week of running. Paris marathon, on the other hand, around about 140, nearer to 139 hours of training. That was about 10 and three quarter hours of training per week for Paris. So at the moment, you can see already we've done fewer miles and less time on feet for Paris. Average pace, well, you can see here for the Goodwood marathon training block, I averaged five minutes 47 per kilometer. But for the Paris marathon training block, I averaged 556 kilometers closer to six minutes per kilometer. So a slower overall average pace for the Paris marathon training block. And now we come on to heart rate. And this I think is quite significant. Average heart rate for my Goodwood marathon training block was 130 beats per minute. Now relatively low, you might say. However, if you look at the Paris marathon training block, my average heart rate for the Paris marathon training block one 23 beats per minute. And we could argue that that is because generally over the course of the training block, I was running slower for the Paris marathon training block around about six minutes per kilometer, as opposed to near 545 per kilometer for the Goodwood training block, not a significantly massive difference, but possibly enough to suggest your heart rate might be lower on average overall. But this is where I think the kicker is. This is where the difference was made for Paris. Let's look at the time I spent in zones four and five. So if you remember, if you know about heart rate zones, zones four and five are full on effort. So zone four, threshold efforts, you're working very hard. Zone five is anaerobic. You are all out here in zone five. So time spent in zones four and five for the Goodwood training block in 2020. So nine hours was spent in zones four and five. So out of the 150 hours I ran, I spent nine of those hours in zones four and five, an average of 41 minutes. Let's move across to the Paris marathon training block. And you'll see I spent a significantly larger amount of time in zones four and five, nearly four hours more, almost 13 hours. So of the 10 and three quarter hours I spent running each week, I spent an average of one hour in zones four or five. Let's go back quickly to Goodwood. And of the 11 and a half hours I spent running each week on average, I only spent around 41 minutes in zones four and five. Significantly less time doing hard efforts, significantly less time running fast, significantly less time doing interval sessions. And I know that on the ground, I know I did three sessions per week, two to three sessions per week for the Paris marathon training block where I was doing fast running. So I did every Monday, I went to the track and I did a track session. Every Wednesday, I did an interval session on Zwift, on the treadmill. And then regularly on a Saturday, I was running park run on Saturday morning, which is a 5k fast all-out effort. So I was definitely doing at least two and often three fast sessions a week for Paris. And just to show you the gains made, how significant this is, I don't know because it was from my watch and it is an estimate, but it's worth looking at. VO2 max estimate on my Garmin watch for the Goodwood marathon basically stayed at around about 53, 54 VO2 max. Whereas there were significant gains when I did Paris. I started at around 55 VO2 max. And over the course of the 13 week training block, we managed to get it up to 57. Not a huge increase in VO2 max, but perhaps significantly different to help me gain that extra three minutes on the marathon time that I got in Paris. So two hours, 58 minutes for Goodwood, two hours, 55 minutes for Paris. So if you watch the channel regularly, you'll know I really am a big advocate of 80-20 running. But the problem with 80-20 running sometimes is that you do forget to do the 20%. It's all very well running the 80% really slow, easy, comfortable efforts. But then when it comes to doing the 20%, it's hard to get yourself out of that really easy running to doing the really hard stuff, the zone four and five stuff where you are hurting for 45 minutes at a time, where you run all out, where you give everything you've possibly got and collapse on the floor at the end of the training session. Those are the tough ones to do. But I think looking at these two training blocks, it's fairly obvious to see that the main gain has been made from doing more of those tough interval sessions, more of that running in zone four and five to increase my speed, to increase my VO2 max to give myself more oxygen to draw from so I can run faster for longer. So I hope you enjoyed that. If you haven't subscribed to the channel, please do so. I really appreciate your support. Really helps out the channel a lot. If you haven't seen my Goodwood video where I broke three hours for the first time, then you can click that link right there. And we'll see you next time on the start line. Bye-bye.