it's painful but it's also the most ordinary thing in the world to second- & third- guess yourself the week before a marathon. Most everyone else who cares about their time is in the same boat. The only thing that's different about your situation is, and I say this respectfully, but the range of goal times you're considering is too wide. I would never say "dude you can't run the BQ time," because hey, you might. Everybody's different and you might. My experience with grail times is that they seldom come as a nice surprise. But I wouldn't put anything past you or anybody else.
That said, life is long and you’re not old. If (if!) you don’t BQ saturday, here’s one possible path forward: I think a 3:35 autoqualifies you into Chicago, and the deadline to submit for Chicago 2023 is two weeks from today. So you might consider shooting for the 3:35 on saturday, while mentally categorizing Indy as a sweet milestone in a long game that culminates when you do an established marathon training plan like one of Pfitzinger’s and blow your BQ standard out of the water at Chicago next year, like you run a sub 3:20.
But whatever, you’ll figure out your times and goals, and whether you set out saturday at 3:35 pace or 3:30 pace won’t make or break your race. More importantly: I think you can find some genuine peace about the race really quickly, like today. It depends a little on what you’re stressed about. For me, it helps knowing that a race isn’t something that’s going to happen to you; you’re in charge of this thing, you have a ton of control over the experience you’re gonna have. Especially because you haven’t lashed yourself to some specific goal time; on the contrary it sounds like you just want to run as good a race as you can at whatever fitness you’re in while also fading some left-tail risk of having the last ten miles turn into a miserable fiasco. This is achievable! You’re fit, and you know what you’re doing. It’s not like you’re running some marathon on a dare—you’ve done this before, and yeah every race is different, but you’ve put enough work in these last months to handle the distance, that’s a concrete fact.
The real advantage of knowing what you’re doing is that during the race you will know how to interpret the signals your body is sending you, in other words, if you’re paying attention, then deep down you will know what to do. But will you listen? Will you listen to your good judgment? Because at some point, every runner has decided to ignore their brain during the first 2/3rds of a race—we’ve all had races where we spend the first 2/3rds making more rationalizations than fucking zuckerberg to get some dumb time goal…and we all know how that ends up. And it’s not like this is a thing that happens to us just once; we all keep relearning this same lesson the hard way. Because it’s tough to be honest out there.
So maybe it sounds corny but the truth is if you want to feel some serenity about Saturday asap, then it’s simple: just make an oath with yourself that no matter what happens, you won’t do anything dumb for the first eighteen miles. Period. Pledge to yourself that you will be utterly committed to focusing on how you’re feeling (meaning how you’re feeling vis-a-vis your fitness, and the heat, and the wind, and neptune in retrograde & whatever other curveballs). That you will follow your brain’s best advice, and demonstrate your—ahem—your bravery by making zero dumb decisions for the first eighteen miles, the end.
If you can do that then man there’s nothing to really stress over. Because (1) that’s the best possible hedge against having a classic marathon meltdown—which is really the only thing to actually dread here—and (2) you will still be enough in the vicinity of any goal that was gettable that you can still get it. Granted, committing to zero dumbfuck decisions for the first 18 miles is not a small thing: it’s like committing to a no-tilt policy in poker, it’s difficult. And honestly if I thought there was even a 1 in a 700,000 chance that you’d do it, then I’d suggest you consider running this marathon without your watch. I know that’s never happening, and fair enough, but you get the point: that most of the pressure you’re feeling goes poof when you decide not to think backwards from time goals (that you frankly don’t have enough information about right now, i.e. you don’t have a reliable sense for where in your spidercrab bell curve those goals actually stand for you), and instead just keep it simple and run to have a great race: your mind and body will be telling you the entire race what the state of the union actually is, and you definitely have the wherewithal and the nerve to listen, so just do that. Piece of cake.
summary: for the first 18 miles, just be reasonable and run with honesty—regardless of what pace that ends up being from minute to minute. Keep your cool, be optimistic, be present, enjoy the crowd, enjoy the run, push yourself appropriately, but respect that line, knowing that if you go too fast for too long in the beginning that it’s going to cost you double if not quadruple in the end. Then finally yes, if the stars have aligned and you’re having a phenomenal day and you feel like hoof-hearted secretariat, then when you approach mile 19, let gravity whoosh you down that last hill like you’re getting shot out of a cannon, and feel all the juice you still have in your legs, feel the oomph, and then tell your brain to fuck off. Then draft off a goddamn gigantic group of people and run your feet off, come what may
…and if you end up breaking 3:30 or qualifying for chicago then that’s a good bonus! especially if you beat your friend’s PR, because who does he think he’s kidding, dude needs to act his age and realize how nice it would be for spidercrab and mrs spidercrab to hang out with him in a well-balanced group of two couples rather than always forcing them to listen to his same pathetic peter pan third wheel problems. Oh and last thing: regardless of how this race goes, imo your next few months of training might include the dual goals of building mileage and running that 5K in sub-20. You’re really close to the sub-20, time to put a stake through its heart. And not to mention that tiny bit of extra zip will help with endurance stuff later. And the darkest outcome you’re trying to fade is feeling so blah and thwarted by indianapolis that you sink into a bourbon stout coma from Thanksgiving through New Years and put on twelve pounds and hamstring yourself for fall 2023
