Second Wind

Congratulations on the record mileage. You should be seeing the fruits of that in racing shortly.

The workout shows that you still do not need interval speed work. Being able to run 3:07 at all, and then dying off to 3:18 shows that you have plenty of natural anaerobic ability, but still lack the aerobic ability in comparison. When your aerobic fitness is where it should be, you will not be able to run an interval in such a way that with 3 minute recoveries you are getting 20 seconds/mile slower at the end. At least not without a roaring tiger chasing you on the fast, and no tiger on the slow.

I would replace those 800s with 3-4 mile tempos at 7:00 pace or faster if it feels good. For speed/power/neural tune-up, just do 10-15 second strides, do not go anaerobic.

Thank you for reading my blog and adding your input. I know you are very busy and it means a lot to have you read and comment on my training. My current training includes tempo runs of increasing length every third week which I try to run at about 7:00 pace on a good day. I have two more hard tempo runs before the SGM of 6-7 miles in length. Hopefully that roaring tiger will be chasing me. I try to incorporate marathon pace strides into my regular runs, maybe they should be more like 5K pace.

The strides should be fast, closer to mile race pace. Even though you are doing tempos already, the energy you have that goes into an interval session will give you better results if you channel it into another tempo, cruise intervals, medium long run, or something else that is aerobic at this point. Intervals are helpful when you start getting stuck at comfortable pace and your race pace for 5 K and for the marathon becomes barely distinguishable.