Prelude to a Marathon

Warning: this post is entirely self indulgent.  There's a 98% chance this will only be interesting to me.

So I have my 4th marathon coming up in a week - The Phoenix Rock 'n' Roll Marathon.  Most of last year's training was done in Peru.  This meant my lungs got a great work out, but the number of long distance runs I could do was lacking.

This year's training has been hampered by ... well, general laziness.  I haven't done one run prior to 9am in order to avoid the cold (i.e. no week day runs) and I've been working a lot (60-65 hour weeks) and I had a badly timed (as far as marathon training is concerned) trip to Aspen.

With all that said, I'm going to be extremely interested to see how things go next week.  For now, let's have a look at ...

Last year's "long" training run 2 weeks before the marathon:

This year's "long" training run 1 week before the marathon:

And a total comparison of the 3 months leading into the race:

I'll post again in a week-ish to compare the actual marathons.