First marathon in the bag!
I've been marathon curious for a long time, and 3 weeks ago a friend offered to transfer their bib to me. I was not training for marathon at all, but I was just finished with a half marathon training block, and starting one to bring by HM time to 1:20.
Long story short, I didn't have long runs beyond 21km, but quite a lot in the 16-18 range (which I think was important, because they gave me a really good sense for what fresh feels like 18 km in).
I started at my base run pace, and felt really good, so I decided to bank a little bit of time over my planned finish of 3:40. My race plan was, more or less, run a mediocre 10k, run a decent HM, and finish with another mediocre 10k + cleanup. By the time I reached 30km, I was a little over 12 minutes ahead of schedule, and so I decided to use this as a buffer for when I would inevitably hit the wall (which I was fearing would be soon).
Turned out I didn't really bink until 34km, so I shifted my goal to finishing 10m ahead, and I used my 2 minutes advance to slow down, and pick up the pace in the descents. I was really surprised the wall came up that late given that I had 0 long runs past 21km. That was nice. By the time I reached 40km, cheers provided the last boost, and I finished with a truly unexpected 3:28.
Well done, me.
A few things that helped: I based my race decisions on HR over pace. I had a soft rule of not going above 150 until 15km, not going over 160 until 30km, and then trying to stay under 170 until the end (that's a bit below my HR). I setup my watch to have the graphic for the last 5 minutes of HR and pace, as well as distance / time / pace strategy info. Out of these, the graphics were more useful. I was able to catch a few unnecessary changes in pace, and a few situations where my HR started going up for no pace improvement (little bit of hydration, better breathing, little slowing down fixed it).
Was I miserable for the last 6km? Hell yeah. Can't wait to suffer again next year. But I think I was afraid of not having done long runs, so I've learned that a great HM training can do wonders!