Weekends are great... Have time to do decent mileage. Emigration Canyon with Kevin and Fritz. Mostly about 7:30 pace on the way up, which felt fast, until the hair pin turns, at which point I lost a little distance when they kept the same pace and I started running 7:45s. I'm not strong on climbs right now (fortunately this doesn't matter in Phoenix), so the way up felt harder than marathon effort. Ran down with them running mostly about 6:20s, which is in the ballpark of what I'll be running at Phoenix. Actually, with a little over a mile to go, I felt Kevin and Fritz pushing the pace, so I told them to take off (apparently they dropped to sub-6), whereas I finished up in 6:18s. Getting dropped twice isn't fun, but I just have to remind myself that these guys are faster than me, so it's OK. Emigration is a steeper downhill than Phoenix's course, but it's at much higher altitude, so overall, I would say that today's run was basically 8 at harder than marathon effort and then 8 at marathon effort. I originally planned for more, but just didn't want to kill myself. I think I'm going to do a really easy 18 on Monday by myself. Several people have said this probably isn't the best idea, but I do recover fast and it's 12 days out from the race, so I'm not really worried about it hurting my race physically, whereas mentally it should be helpful. This week was, once again, really low mileage-wise, but today's run is good in terms of getting in a good effort for a pretty long period of time and Monday's workout was exactly what I needed, so the quality is still there. I'll get in one more longer day and then just do some shorter marathon pace stuff and easy runs. I'm definitely not as fit as I could be, but I'm also definitely more marathon ready than I had been in the past, thanks to actually doing good workouts. I'm still debating what the best pacing plan is, but I will definitely not go out any faster than 1:23 in Phoenix and I'm thinking that maybe 1:24 would be better (a negative split would be great, if possible). I haven't run a marathon in a few years, so I might as well have the first one back not be a horrific trainwreck. :) Got in a couple hours of hiking afterwards with Holly, her twin sister Nala, and Nala's owners: 
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