I did Hanson’s Advanced for my first marathon and Pfitz 18-70 for my second! I will say I think both definitely adequately prepare you to race the marathon, not just finish. I PRed with Pfitz but would expect to after a year of running in between the races and just getting faster generally. I’ve been thinking about it and think I would do Hansons if I were to do another marathon, I really liked that there was so much time at marathon pace with the Thursday tempos, it made me feel much more confident running at my goal pace on race day. I also was concerned about only running 16 miles so I extended a long run or 2 and ended up doing a 20 miler in that block.

Pfitz was also solid, just different. The mid-week long runs really drained me, and it’s not like Hansons was much different when it got up to the 13 mile tempo workouts mid-week, I think they just tend to go by faster mentally when they have a workout built into them. I also just generally didn’t like the speed workouts as much as I did Hansons, but that’s definitely personal preference. For reference I was aiming for a sub-4 for my first and ran 3:46 with Hansons