Sorry I missed this earlier, I’m often browsing on other lemmy instances since I find world to be so slow. Thanks for sharing your experience though!

The training plan fell apart pretty hard for me not long after making this post. I’d been dealing with a bit of knee pain that just got worse and worse (and consequently I got slower and slower). Over the last three-ish weeks I reduced my mileage quite a bit, including one week of just 3 miles and lots of stretching. Thankfully my knee is better now and I don’t have much pain anymore. But I’m a bit hesitant to dive back into the advanced plan, and in particular the speed sessions.

I’m slowly getting back into the beginner plan but I’ll see how well I stick to it. I think at this point trying to keep up a relatively high but slow weekly mileage to maintain an aerobic base will be the way to go, but it will depend on pain. I might just have to suck up another mediocre marathon compared to my goal, and try again next time. I definitely won’t be rushing into such an advanced plan again without gradually increasing my weekly mileage more carefully.

Yeah I’m a little bit hesitant to change the plan on my own whims, especially as it’s my first time using a plan. Reading into it a bit more, compared to other plans it seems like Hansons really emphasizes the constant fatigue vs. hitting extremely high weekly mileage. So maybe I’ll try and stick with the prescribed taper plan, although I may skip or slow down one of the speed workouts in the last week depending on how I feel. I don’t want to mess it up and miss my “peak”.

Ideally eating properly and slowing down my easy runs will do the trick before then anyway. I’ve been sleeping 7-8 hours pretty consistently.

I can’t remember which episode it is, but there’s an episode of one of Anthony Bourdain’s shows where he visits a restaurant run by his friend.

This chef is serving a massive multi-course meal, something like 10+ courses, and knows that Bourdain is a heavy smoker. So at one point he brings out the next course and tells Bourdain something along the lines of “And this one is made with tobacco, so you won’t try and get up in the middle of my dinner and go smoke”.

I guess if the dose is low enough and the tobacco is mixed with the right foods, it could possibly make for an interesting flavour combination.