How to Run a FASTER Marathon

It seems crazy to trim almost 9 minutes off a marathon time which equates to about 20 seconds per mile. If you only look at my actual running time (3:46:19) and don’t include my 'break', I would have been over 13 minutes or about 30 seconds PER MILE faster. I knew it was going to be a good race because of the weather and the flat course, but you still have to do the work and actually run that fast. When you get right down to it, there is only one thing I did differently in training and that was “RUNNING FASTER”. That was really it. So my advice to all marathoners is if you want to run the race faster, you have to train faster. Bottom line. Once I fully recover from this marathon, I will aim to run my training miles even faster because I KNOW this is what makes the biggest difference. (12 days later and feeling decent but not fully recovered yet. I will get to 50 miles this week but they are not fast miles. I have brought my pace into the 9's and 10's temporarily but not pushing to sustain that yet. I can't wait to feel perfect again because we have some shorter races coming up!) Here is a breakdown of factors and non-factors in the race compared to my previous best marathon (October 2018). In my opinion, weather is a HUGE factor in a successful marathon. Temperatures in the 40’s are perfect for marathons! When you have weather on your side, you just have to GO FOR IT!!