The marathon starts at 7/am. If the marathon were tomorrow, it'd be 33 degrees at the start and, if finishing sometime at or before 11/am, somewhere between 46 and 52 degrees at the finish. That ain't bad.
I've begun to think about fueling during the marathon. I didn't fuel at all during my training runs. The most I took was 16 oz. of water on long-runs only. I don't think I properly fueled during Green Mountain, so I won't repeat that approach (2 or so gels over the course of the marathon). I think a gel every 5 or 6 miles will do the trick. I have no problem stomaching them, so I might as well use them, as it beats the hell out of chewing chomps/beans or swallowing salt tablets.
What else? I've finally retired my second to last pair of Lunar Trainer at 950 miles. I gave them a final run on Sunday in Central Park. They treated me well. I'm now fully transitioned into my last pair, and I'll run the marathon in them. On March 1st, I'm going to pick up a pair of NB Road Minimus. I probably won't be able to run full-time in them, but I'll start working them into my rotation (which, currently, includes only one pair of shoes). I'm excited about them.
I'm at about 27 miles for the week. I'll finish the week off with 5 tonight, 3 tomorrow, and 13 on Sunday. I'll throw in a few MP miles on Sunday, but the majority of that run will be at a low intensity. At this point, I don't plan on doing anymore tempos, but a few MP miles on Tuesday or Thursday of next week won't hurt. This training has been made up of largely aerobic conditioning and very little anaerobic threshold and VO2 max work. I felt that, during this initial training of higher volume, aerobic conditioning was sufficient. However, I was able to get in a few tempos at the very end of the training but not any intervals. This was quite different than last training, during which I did a tempo or interval session on a weekly basis. In hindsight, that was too much hard training for my fitness level at that point. Now that I've done it, training the Lydiard way--that is, spending as many months as possible building an aerobic base and THEN for a short period only sharpening on the hills, doing drills (e.g., hill-bounding), and incorporating anaerobic threshold and VO2 max workouts--makes a lot of sense. The guy was a genius, and I plan to continue to train by his methods in the future. I find Pfitz and all the rest to be smart, but their plans are convoluted. For me, volume is important, so I know that I need to run a lot (mostly easy, some hard). That's pretty simple. Being a slave to a plan is bad news, as I've found that I don't always feel fresh on my hard days. What I do then is skip the hard day entirely. I buffer my last hard run with even more easy, aerobic running, setting me up for my next hard day. This has worked quite well for me. Following the Runner's World Training: Smart Coach thing for Green Mountain was a disaster. I felt stale for the good majority of the time and even worse at the mary.
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