Ten weeks. Seventy consecutive run days. 552 miles. One October morning on the fastest course you've ever run. The floor is a Boston qualifier you can actually get into. The ceiling is a number you've been circling for four years.
Planned mileage is a ceiling on tired weeks, not a debt. Click a week to open it.
Live as of right now. Nothing here is aspirational — it's arithmetic.
Point to point, net downhill, two-thirds paved bikeway along the Mohawk and then the Hudson. It is the fastest course you have ever run — and the shape of the drop is exactly wrong for a runner who fades. Almost all of the free elevation is spent between miles 14 and 18, and the last 5 miles are dead flat along the river with nothing left to give you.
Three loading weeks, three step-backs, one 68-mile peak, then the taper. Step-backs follow the 20-, 20-, and 22-mile long runs — the absorption is the point, not the reward.
Bad sleep, sick kid, run-down. Run the scheduled miles easy, or cut to 2–4. Do not relocate the workout to another day.
Splits slipping >5 sec repeatedly, or RPE above 8 early. Stop the quality portion. Finish easy. The workout already told you what it knew.
Focal pain or altered gait. The streak does not outrank health. Stop and assess — 70 days means nothing on October 12.
Heat and humidity. Run the prescribed effort and accept the slower pace. Do not grade August fitness on raw numbers.
No make-up miles. Ever. Consistently good beats one heroic week followed by two dead ones.
Fuel like it's the race. 40–50 g/hr in August, building to 60–75 g/hr by September. Start at 25–30 minutes. Lake Placid happened without gels — that experiment is closed.
Drag to set a finish time. These splits are not an even-pace fantasy and they are not a negative split. In 24 marathons you have positive split 24 times — so the model plans for it: a small honest cushion through halfway, a mild give-back to 20, and a controlled 2-minute fade over the last 10K instead of a 5-minute one. The job on race day is to make the fade small, not to pretend it won't happen.
| Checkpoint | Split | Elapsed | Pace |
|---|
Boston 2016 took you 4:24:20. Your PR is 3:03:28 at The Cheap Marathon in April 2025. Sub-3 is 3 minutes and 29 seconds of work away from a race you have already run.