For those of you in the dark on this, I'm running the Country Music Marathon in Nashville on Saturday, April 24th. This will be my second marathon, having run the Marine Corps Marathon in 2001. I've been using a training plan from Hal Higdon's site, which I heartily recommend.

The plan I'm following (Intermediate Level I, for those of you morbidly interested) called for me to run two 20-mile runs near the end of the program, and I'm proud to say that I completed the second of the two on Monday night. Managed to finish in 3:19 and change; that's just under a 10-minute-mile, which is a bullseye for the long training run. I want to target a race pace right around 9:10/mile, and you're supposed to do your long training runs at between 45 and 90 seconds longer than your anticipated race pace.

Weirdly, I wasn't really sore after the 20-miler. Granted, I took a step back after the first 20-miler two weeks before, but still, you'd think I'd be hurting. I expected to hurt. I keep waiting for the hurt to jump me as I round a corner. I guess that's a good sign!

Anyway, from now until the race I taper down my runs to allow my body to recover from the stress of training. Woo hoo! Less work!