I came out of a 17 year retirement from my last race (which was the NYC Marathon in 1999) and at age 54 lowered my PR from 3:45:58 to 3:43:35 at Newport, OR using Hansons.
Having said that, I consider the race to be a fail because I was supposedly trained for 3:30:00, which was my goal. Not only that, I had a coach who told me that if I completed the training schedule, I'd have about a 95% chance of running that 3:30.
I had a little over 60 workouts altogether and averaged 50 miles for the last ten weeks. Not only that, I hit the splits on every single one of my speed, strength and tempo workouts. The long runs were a little more hazy because there weren't specific time goals.
I had injury concerns along the way but got through all of that and made it to the starting line ready to go and it was a perfect weather day. I was on an 8:00 pace through about 14.5 miles and started to fade every mile after that - starting at mile 21, I ran 9:06, 9:12, 9:27, 9:39, 9:58 and 10:17.
The problem is my coach told me to go and run 8:00 miles when I really wasn't quite in that shape and it blew up my whole race. I'm hoping to get back to the same race next year and fix this by shooting for something between 3:33-3:35.
So, my eight month Hansons experience wasn't a good one at the end of the day.