I put this in the main forum, but in case you missed it: I am going to be doing a conference call next week and I am looking for questions to answer on the call about marathon preparation and recovery - specifically, what you can do while you are training and in the few days and hours leading up to the race so that you can race well, avoid or run through the wall, and then recover quickly from the marathon. If you have a question that you would like answered, then please either post it here or (preferably) go to: http://www.marathoning.org/1-question.html Entering your question on my web page will sign you up for the call-in details and will make it so that you can download the call afterwards. I've had about a dozen people sign up for it so far and have about 8 questions to answer, but my goal is to have a large pool of questions to draw from so that I don't have enough time to answer them all. A couple of the questions that I've received so far are not really on topic. (Note that if you sign up on my web page it will add you to a sublist of my email newsletter, so you'll receive emails about the call, but it will not add you to my main newsletter list so you won't receive that unless you want to sign up for it separately.) I will probably be hosting the call at the end of next week or next weekend. I haven't figured out how I am going to do the call yet but should get that finalized this weekend and will have the call-in details hopefully by Monday.

Blaine, can I post some training questions for you here?

I had gone ahead and posted my whole first marathon explanation and plan onto a different thread in the meantime http://runningahead.com/groups/MMM/Forum/ecc461349f10442cb1c0014c4de0f9f4 I don't know where I got the idea to do long runs every other weekend. Somehow that entered my head, and I decided to do these weekend runs: 14mi, 10mi, 17mi, 10mi, 20mi, 10mi -- haven't decided what to do with the next two weekends. Let's say for weekends (parens around ones already happened): (14mi, 10mi), 17mi, 10mi, 20mi, 10mi, 10mi, 10mi, mary. Last weekend I did the 14mi. This weekend I did 8mi instead of 10 (b/c I was running with others), so to make up for that, I did 10mi today -- plus, it has occurred to me that maybe I should not be taking every other weekend off so much. I've still not made my decision on whether I'll run or Galloway the actual marathon. My target pace will be about 9:30, I think -- that is one that is easy for me to maintain, and sometimes I tend to drift faster than that in my easy runs, so I think picking that will avoid me burning out too fast. If I feel good after a while, I might move it up to 9:00, but I'm leaving that as a to be decided when running thing. Anyway, is there conventional wisdom in doing a long run every other weekend? What do you think of that? One obvious alternative is that I could be doing long runs every weekend. I could, for example, do this (as I already didn't go long this weekend, so in terms of long runs this weekend was like a cut-back): (14mi, 10mi), 16mi, 18mi, 14mi, 20mi, 12mi, 10mi, mary Or perhaps you have some alternate suggestions, for this or other part of my tactics?