All this talk about running today, what's gotten into you guys?  At least there's one picture of food!  Happy birthday, Dave!

 

Heh. I "trained" for my first marathon, all 20-25mpw of it, at a steady 8:30 pace. Marathon was 9:00-9:15 for the first 75%, 11:30 for the rest.

 

Clearly your training strategy worked, if you were able to get from 4:30 down to 3:00. Not sure how long or how many marathons that took you, or how old you were/are. Pretty sure my body could not hold up to that kind of mileage, I would break into a million pieces.

4:30 was Chicago 2004 (38).  2:59 was Chicago 2010 (44).  There were 46 marathons in between and many different training approaches.  When I finally made it to the high mileage training my race times dropped dramatically and I found I could race more often (consecutive weekends, even consecutive days).  As was mentioned a bit earlier, it also matters about 'different training at different points in your running life'.  All the training I'd done prior made it possible for me to build up the mileage.

At 50, I'm making another run at it.  I'm increasing weekly mileage on my way back up to the 80+ range to get ready for the fall.  Should be fun!