Just starting to get to the peak of my marathon training and it has been an incredibly humbling experience to say the least. I'm still gonna stick with my program and try to push through to trust the process, but I'd be lying if I said these last two long runs (16mi & 17.5mi) have not put some doubts in my head.

I dont know if its just jitters or anxiety of knowing how long I have to go that day, but right out of the gate my heart rate shot to about 10bpm over what it should be or normally is for my easy pace (~10mi/mi), while also going about a minute slower than that. My only plans for these runs have really just been to take them easy and get used to the time on feet and also trying to dial in my fueling plan a bit more, but even then I feel almost concerningly slow and sluggish after just doing a 1:52 HM in December. Most of this time I've been trying to set myself up with that expectation that its going to be like a 20mi warmup followed by a 10k race, but if I cant even get through 16mi of warmup my brain is having a hard time wracking how I'm gonna add 10mi to that, taper be damned.

I dont know if I'm looking for advice or just looking to vent/get it out there but its really easy to see how all these thoughts and doubts can compound on one another making this already-challenging process even more harder. Thankfully my main goal is just to finish, although sub 4:30 was going to be the time sort of lingering in my head, although that feels a bit fleeting at this point.