First a bit background about me so advice can be more personalized (please bare with me):
Age: 25, Male and for running background, I've managed to turn my fitness/life around from these days:
https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=9936281
Summarizing the above link, I went from being a mild alcoholic and not fitting into my pants after 2.5 years of Zero running to getting to decent fitness after realizing I may have a problem when the Letsrun Trolls are telling me I might be an alcoholic.
Anyways, over a few months of struggling to not reach for the bottle every night, I slowly went from drinking around 5-6 beers + a small glass or 2 of whiskey a day to drinking a few times a week to now only drinking on social occasions. I added workouts, got injured for a few weeks a couple of times but pulled it together enough to get back into it each time. I started doubling and built up to 8 weeks of 80-90 mile weeks over 6 days before my first marathon in December 2022 in low 2:3X. I take a day off every single week because I honestly just need it mentally.
So moving on from that, I'd like to run some 1500s/3ks in the spring to hopefully run faster than highschool/college times.
I took a full week off after the marathon, took another week of only jogging, and built back mileage but it seems that I've lost a decent amount (not all) of motivation to get better, probably because I put all my energy in that marathon. I've signed up for Chicago in October, but I don't have the energy to keep the mileage up until then.
It seems like many people tend to just stress over mileage and cut workouts when they're burnt out but what's really the logic here? Why not just do 2 or 3 runs week (1 track, 1 moderate-hard long, 1 something in between (threshold maybe if I feel like it) to maintain or even gain fitness after you've built up some aerobic base? I guess the more specific question is, if the point of easy jogging (I do these around 7:40-8;20 pace btw and everything else around marathon pace or faster) is mainly improve Running Economy which is based on fat burning, how quickly do you lose the ability to burn fat efficiently? I feel more ok with doing workouts since I can just hop in a local running group and just run with them which is much easier and also fun. There's lots of threads about only running hard 3 times a week but my question is, I've sort of done some amount of work in mileage but can I maintain fitness by doing moderate to hard workouts a few times a week and cutting ALL easy runs?
Anyways probably overthinking but I just wanted to start a discussion here.