I don't dispute the logic of these points (other than the need for a 24 miler), but while it is sound advice, it is advice that I am not interested in following.
My body has very few marathons left in it. Honestly, my next one will likely be my last at least until I run 50 and move up an age group. I am just not designed for the marathon. It is something that I have always known, and that knowledge has been confirmed by my physical therapist and by the PhD who runs the lab where I did my gait analysis.
So, here I sit, a little over 8 weeks out from Chicago, with a pretty reasonable amount of fitness, a pretty decent volume base, some good, but no great, workouts under my belt. The issue that I had in my Boston cycle (PTT) is lurking in the background, but my PT thinks she can keep it at bay enough for me to get through the next couple of months.
So do I pull the plug and focus on some future race instead or do I bear down and see if I can augment and sharpen my fitness and seek to satisfy my goal in early October?
I am going with October. There is no guaranty that the next training cycle will be there. This PTT issue may now be a chronic issue. Even if it is not a chronic issue and my body started feeling better, having to work through another entire 18-24 week marathon cycle is just not something that I am prepared to do again, maybe ever, but certainly in the next 6-10 months.
Sub 2:30 is a legitimate goal that I want to achieve and it would be a meaningful and satisfying capstone to my second act as a runner. But if I don't hit that time in Chicago and that turns out to be my last marathon, I am going to be fine with it, even if I am initially disappointed. And to be honest, the sub 2:30 is a stretch goal in the first place. I ran my first marathon in 2014, so I decided to look at the world majors run on US soil since then (since those are the three marathons that I have run and since they tend to get deep fields and cannot reasonably be argued to be gimmick courses (except Boston on a tail wind day, which has not happened in the time period in question)). Out of the 13 races in that group, one American age 45 and older has gone sub 2:30, and that was at Chicago in 2014 when someone ran 2:29:53. So if I end my racing career with a race in which I fail to hit a time that only one other American in my current age group has hit in the marathons that I have run, I will by no means feel like I have failed. I feel good enough about my record as a masters runner, and I know in my heart that I have given training and racing my all over the course of my masters career, so I could quit on this training cycle right now and feel that I have accomplished more than could have been reasonably expected of me as a masters athlete, especially when you consider where I was in my mid-to-late 30s.
So at the end of the day, I would prefer to take the "let's do our best to stay healthy and get in a handful of great workouts in and a few more good workouts in over the 6 weeks before my taper and see where things end up" approach.