SprintTriathlon wrote:
Some illness will have a huge impact, but it is also as easy as this: You cannot put a 10 k time and then from that extract the marathon time. Five hours of moving at your best effort. That takes courage and a lot of training.
This is all true. I agree about it being more of an ultra length of time on the course. Especially in terms of the demands on the different systems of the body.
But honestly, I’d run two runs over 20 miles in the lead up at 5 hour pace. Those came at the end of my longest weeks, and I felt like those didn’t totally drain the tank or destroy my legs. I don’t think it was unreasonable to think I could add 6 miles and run 4% faster on race day -especially with the benefits of a taper and the boost of a real race environment. If I was going to break down, I expected it to happen at a point in the race when I was pushing beyond what I’d done in training.