Tuesday 8 mi.

8 miles easy jogging, no watch.
I am surprised that I feel as good as I do today. I'm sure that the 10k yesterday was well off my current fitness best and I even think the race was too easy for me to be sore today! My legs feel very good.
I am in the market for a mentor in my marathon training. Alan has told me that I am running too much.. yesterday a very reputable coach (and 2:14 marathoner- I think?) told me that I am training too much. I have to believe that I'm not training too much based on my training markers and yesterday's race performance. 32:46 isn't fast.. but if I was fried it should have been slower. My body is holding up better than ever. I'm healthy and happy running 17 miles a day. The 3 workouts that I have slated for this coming week are as follows:
Specific Block- am) 5 wu) 8 miles at 5:30 pace. 1 cd)
pm) 3 wu) 6 miles at 5:30 pace. 1 cd)

Intervals- 4 wu) 3 X 3 miles in 16:00/ 15:45/ 15:30 all on 800 meter float in 3:00.

Long run- 25 miles progressing from 7:00 pace to start down to 6:00 pace to finish.

These workouts are part Canova (famous Italian coach), part Jack Daniels (the whiskey, not the coach) and part Lucho (guy with a beard) ... look at each workout and you'll see that each is difficult in it's own right for different reasons, each trains a different aspect of fitness from marathon specific pace to lactate threshold to endurance. All are key components to my running well on October 14th. On each of these days I will also be concentrating heavily on visualizing the pain of the marathon and practicing dealing with the intensity of the discomfort that I hope to be in. I am pretty sure that yesterday the guy that got second to me was in better shape... I was just tougher. I see a lot of athletes ease up when it gets tough when it really does come down to simple discipline and pain management. I believe that both of these aspects of mental strength can over ride physical ability.