Recovery Days - or ?

No running on monday in line with my committment last week to ease up on the effort and mileage to see if the twinge(s) in my left quad, IT Band and Hip would stop irritating me and just go away. However not complete rest as I was persuaded to go on a 35 mile cycle with my ex-running partner. Covered the 35 miles in less than two hours (something like 03:21 minutes per mile - sub two hour marathon here I come or should I say there I've gone) A 9 mile easy run in the park on the cards this morning. No let up in the left quad tenderness department so after two miles I decided to take the boring predictable pace out of the run and introduce a few fartleks over 150 to 300m to experience target 5k pace - for tomorrows race. While the effort was manageable over these short distances I don't know how I am going to keep it going for 5k. I prefer a slow build up to the pain and fatigue that a marathon gives you rather than the instant introduction to burning lungs/legs that these faster races bring. With the fartleks I covered the distance in 1:11:24 to give an average pace of 07:49 and HR of 137 over 9.14 miles. I have my second test run on the track under HADD next week to see what improvement I have made on foot of my aerobic conditioning runs. The test consists of running 6 laps of the track at average heart rates varying from 130 to 170 bpm (10 bpm intervals) with 90 second rests and recording the average pace for each HR - should be interesting. I was planning on continuing with this sort of training until the Dublin Marathon at the end of October, given that aerobic conditioning is 90 to 95% of what's required for long distance races. However I now am having second thoughts and am thinking of following a more traditional approach while I still have time (12 weeks to go) - i.e. 5 weeks of Endurance plus speedwork (mainly tempo runs), 4 weeks of sharpening/Intervals and 3 weeks of taper. I'll leave it another week to decide.