Time is drawing near.  My very first marathon is in a little over three weeks!  My training seems to have been going on for most of the year, and my miles sure have added up.  I started training back during the second week of June, and since I still had a good fitness level I was able to ramp up pretty quickly, and then ease back about every other weekend.  I even threw in a two-week break from long training, without any sacrifice.

I did become a little concerned though. I have had this nagging pain on the ball of my left foot, that has driven me a bit bonkers, as of lately.  With the marathon coming up so soon, I worried about over-use.  In looking at my training, my long mileage days have been right up around the 20 mile mark several times.

Usually most training schedules have you doing a 20 mile training run ONCE, three weeks out from the actual marathon race. I would have another 20 miler this Saturday, but something was telling me that I needed to find out if I was going to kill my stamina for the actual event.

I hopped on Hal Higdon‘s Face book page and posed the question.  I figured that if anyone knew the answer, he sure would!  His training schedules are the backbone of most, if not all Marathon training.

That settled it; cut back to a 14 mile run on Saturday, and then do ONE more 20 mile run the next Saturday; after that begin to taper, until race day!