Oooh, marathons four weeks apart. This is my specialty :O).

corland14, you can do this. These marathons are far enough apart. The key is to pick the one that is your A race, and treat the other one, as you say, like a long run or victory lap.

I love marathons. Just love them. I run a marathon or 50k about once a month. Four weeks is plenty of time for me, but I am not exploring the limits of my capabilities on any of these runs. If I want to PR, I will take a break for several months leading up to it.

You have the absolutely perfect attitude in your first post. You can do both of these if you treat the first one like a long run, and have the personal discipline not to get caught up and race. The only goal you should be shooting for is your designated long run pace. If you ran hard for your 4:06 PR, as you say you did, I'm not sure trying to better that time qualifies as a reasonable, conservative way to run the first one, but you know your this-year fitness level better than I do. Your goal needs to be simply to complete the run and get to the starting line of #2 healthy and energized. I agree that not kicking it in should help a lot. Don't taper for the first race more than a few easy days, take a week with half milage afterwards, then get in one solid week of training and start your taper for #2.

Alternately, you can race the first one, shoot for that PR, and then cruise through the second one as a victory lap, just to experience the day and put another notch in your belt. There is probably a higher chance of injury with this plan, however, because it just takes a while for your body to be ready to go long after giving it all you've got over the full marathon distance. Perhaps the courses should educate your decision on this one. Also, you may choose to race the first one, and get hit by some terrible weather system the day before, and throttle back your goals. Race number two, in that case, is a backup.

quote:<HR>Originally posted by corland14:

By the way, my 25k from this spring computes out to a 3:40 marathon with McMillan so the 9min/mile (4 hour) pace is an easy run.

<HR>

Be careful with that. There is a huge fallacy in that logic - a mistake that almost everyone makes.

The McMillan calculator assumes equal training for each distance. But the marathon requires a lot of specific adaptations that can take a very long time to train. In addition, an awful lot of general running people do may act as "training" for a 25K (at least somewhat) but will help very little for the marathon.

So people put in a few months of marathon training against a race that requires lots of training and think this is the equivalent of years of training for a race that requires less training.

They set their pace based on a calculator and then wonder why they crashed.

It is so easy in a training program to find your time expectations creeping. Looking at that calculator might be encouragement for you to do that. If (conservatively thinking) you are in reality only ready to run a 3:55 but manage to convince yourself to shoot for a 3:35 or 3:40 you might have really tough going in the last miles.

And struggling badly through the last miles is NOT a way to be successful at doing two of these with only a medium recovery period.

Very do-able, and great advice so far.

Last fall I ran Quad Cities Marathon, then four weeks later ran Chicago Marathon, then four weeks later ran the JFK50.

Had the most difficulty in the first race and by the time I got to the last one (a 50 miler) felt great.

Definitely a way to pack some quality running into a short amount of time - and it's off that base that I BQ'ed 8 weeks after JFK50!

kestrou