Look at the pretty maps...

Did 18 mile long run this morning with one mile at marathon pace effort. According to my brand spanking new garmin, it says I did 18.19 miles at 8:25 pace. You can see the route and data here. I mapped it out on google earth and it says i did 18.29 miles. Interesting. My older garmin would always over predict, but this 405 is underpredicting. I'll have to try a few more runs with it to see if this is going to be common or not.

I only originally intended to do 16 miles, but extended it a bit. I probably won't do a long run next week since I'm getting the wisdom teeth extracted on Friday so i wanted to put in a long run to see how the endurance is. I had thought about 10 miles in of maybe trying to push this to 20 miles, but since i haven't done any long runs more than 15 miles for quite some time, i figured it would be better to stop at 18.

I've kinda been in no mans land in terms of marathon training. I haven't been doing enough on my long runs to properly train for a marathon, but i'm doing enough that if I wanted to i could easily ramp up. I've been thinking about when the "point of no return is" for marathon training. What is the minimum amount of time that would be necessary to prepare for a marathon and run well? Pftiz has a 12 week schedule so i guess that's a start. I'm starting to enter the point of no return for several marathons. the Toronto waterfront is 8 weeks out, Chicago is 10 weeks out and the other Toronto one is 11 weeks out and the Hamiton one (which is nearby to Toronto) is 13 weeks out.

I'm thinking that considering my recent history that i could probably get by this time around with 7 weeks or so, that is, one month of solid training and a three week taper.