Training for a marathon current marathon pace Vs goal pace

It depends on how your plan is structured and the workouts you are doing. Generally it's pace you can complete workouts at while avoiding burnout and injury.

My tempo pace eventually becomes my marathon pace.

No way I could hold that pace the first week of training for more than five miles, but after 3 months and with a proper taper I can hold marathon pace.

I like the idea of taking a 10ish second pace range approach and trying to start out your cycle at the top of the range and slowly work your way down. Some days you will feel good and progress within that range. To me it creates bookends to try to stay between for M/T or whatever pace definitions you subscribe to (aerobic tempo, easy tempo etc.)

This isn't a marathon specific comment but not sure why it wouldn't hold tru for the marathon as well.

I don't know if I did everything correctly but my marathon race pace was between 5:45 and 5:50 per mile and while I might run a 3 to 5 mile portion of a longer run at that pace, I'd never do an entire longer run that fast. When doing mile intervals though they would be in the 4:50 to 5:00 minute pace. There is a lot of value to having some target marathon pace included in your workouts but you have to be very careful about not overdoing it. A 15 mile long run with the last 3 to 5 miles at target pace would be fine. A 20 mile long run with 10 slower and 10 at target marathon pace would be too close to a race effort. This has been my approach for the last 45 years I've been racing and it seems to be a good balance between performance and injury risk

marathon pace wrote:

When training for a marathon do you train with current marathon pace for marathon workouts or marathon goal pace?

Obviously you get fitter over 18 weeks so marathon pace does change.

I'd advise not to pick an arbitrary time/pace (GMP) and then try to run that in workouts. Either you will work too hard or not hard enough in your MP efforts. If you have experience training for and running marathons before, you should be able to find (by feel and informed from past efforts and current fitness level) the correct pace for MP workouts (this could get faster as your block progresses but you should really be increasing the length of the MP portion, so more likely it remains approximately the same). If you need 3 or 4 days to recover after a long run with, say, 10 or 12 MP miles, you're probably going too hard (and that pace will not be sustainable in the marathon); if it takes nothing or little out of you, it's probably too easy and you should run the MP miles faster. MP doesn't equal LT or (normally understood) tempo. This you have to know by feel and experience.

Naperville Runner wrote:

I don't know if I did everything correctly but my marathon race pace was between 5:45 and 5:50 per mile and while I might run a 3 to 5 mile portion of a longer run at that pace, I'd never do an entire longer run that fast. When doing mile intervals though they would be in the 4:50 to 5:00 minute pace. There is a lot of value to having some target marathon pace included in your workouts but you have to be very careful about not overdoing it. A 15 mile long run with the last 3 to 5 miles at target pace would be fine. A 20 mile long run with 10 slower and 10 at target marathon pace would be too close to a race effort. This has been my approach for the last 45 years I've been racing and it seems to be a good balance between performance and injury risk

How do you determine the pace on the race day then?

You have to run by feel!

I don't think 10 E + 10 MP is too close to race effort. Several people have mentioned it as a good marathon workout. It's true that long MP runs can be challenging and sometimes you can fail those workouts, and at some point a long MP run really does get too close to race effort.

But for a 3-hour marathoner, 10 E + 10 MP is 20 miles in 2:28:40 (assuming 8:00/mile E). The MP segment by itself is only 49.9 in terms of VDOT (compared to 53.5 for the 3-hour marathon itself), which seems like enough difference to stay on the safe side. I've gone up to 14 @ MP and it was challenging, but not (yet) a race effort. Where people get in trouble is trying to hit GMP. A lot of the long tempos early in the build-up are 10-30 seconds off of eventual MP.

Going by feeling on race day is a terrible idea. Unlike a HM or shorter, you can let the pace come to you in a marathon and end up 10-30 seconds faster/mile than you should be doing.