Hi,
I'm running a marathon on October 20th (it will be my fourth and my first since Chicago in October). Since I was coming back from a surgery in late November I decided to take the beginning of the year without a plan set in stone to see how recovery would go. So I started to train as if I were doing a marathon in may and see how things were going. Luckily everything seems to go very well.
My main goal in October is to go sub-3, so to develop speed as much as possible (last marathon was 3:14 because of cramps), so as my fake marathon training go into the final stage I'm beginning to wonder if it wouldn't be better use of my time to work on smaller yet faster run to develop speed and minimise fatigue. As an example my long run 2 weeks ago was 33km, last week was a down week with 25km (with a 12km fast finish) and this weekend would be an easy 35km and another 35km 2 weeks from now on peak week. I seriously have no problem doing these run but I'm starting to question how relevant they are this far ahead from my race in October or if they're just creating fatigue preventing me from doing better speedwork and therefore build more speed.
Bottom line should I just keep doing a marathon plan, or switch and do more of a speed plan until the real beginning of my October marathon plan that would start mid to late June.
Thanks