Hi there,
I know this may sound like a pretty strange thing, but I'm hoping somewhere out there may have had a similar problem, and found a way to resolve it.

I'm training for the London Marathon, and my girlfriend piped up an interest in doing it too. She's quite a fit girl, but hasn't really done much distance running before, whereas I trained for last years marathon, and had to defer my entry, due to a skiing injury.

The problem is, that I'd quite like to go for a good time, and my lady (naturally) runs slower than I do. We're now 7 weeks into the training schedule, and the problem is really starting to become obvious. I'm causing her to run faster than she can comfortably, and I'm running well below the pace I'd like to.

I'm sure carrying on like this will be no good for either of us, and will also limit my chances of achieving a good time when it comes to the race.

I thought about joining a running club, so she can meet up with people with of a more similar pace, however, we're both busy people, can have to fit the training runs in when we can, and wouldn't be able to run, 'when the club runs'.

Does anyone have any good ideas of how we can overcome the problem?

Thanks in advance,
Seth

I'd recommend you run most of your runs with her at a very easy pace and convince her that you should run a couple of runs a week at your own pace. It actually is very good training to run most of your mileage, especially long runs at an easy pace. I run about 80% of my mileage with someone who is quite a bit slower than I am. In fact, I almost never hit my marathon pace in any training runs. Perhaps if you belong to a gym, you can do some runs on treadmills, side-by-side, each at your own pace.

Agree with the last poster. Good to complete the long runs at a conservative pace.

But the shorter runs need to be faster and challenging to you otherwise you're just clocking miles of little or no physical benefit unless it's a recovery run post a tough session!!!!!!!!!!!!