There was only one way to find out!

Due to some bad math on my part, I signed up for the Twin Cities marathon this year exactly 3 weeks out from IMOO. I was aware that the conventional wisdom says that this is a bad idea. However:

1) I probably only ran 22 or 23 miles at IMOO, the rest I walked.
2) I was ticked off about my run time. Pretty sure I torpedoed it by going too hard earlier in the day.
3) There were no nagging injuries, etc., after IM.
4) I have nothing in particular planned for the next several weeks, so there would be plenty of time to recover.

So I decided to say what the hell and see if I could make a go of it.

Between IM and race day my workouts were "taper lite." I did nothing from M-F after the race except walking the dog a few times. That weekend, I did 2 easy 1 hour bike rides. I started running again 10 days after IM on this schedule:

Wed 3.5 miles
Friday 5 miles
Sunday 10 miles -- this was the decision day. If 10 felt good I was for sure going to attempt the race. It felt fine.
Tuesday: 5 miles
Wednesday 3 miles
Friday 2 miles
Sunday - race.

I wore a HRM for every run and noticed that my HR was consistently 8 to 10 beats higher at similar speed and effort. I'm sure this was a combo of post IM fatigue and a cold that I caught immediately after IM which had mostly resolved by the time I started running.

On race day, I woke up feeling somwhat sick. I'd gone to a football game the day before and sat in some crummy weather. I still had a chill/headache feeling 24 hours later. Breakfast was light: an ensure, some coffee, a few bites of a cliff bar, and a 300 calorie bottle of Inifinit that I brought to the race start. I popped 2 advil (all I had with me) to combat the fever, dozed off in the car as a friend drove me to the start, and was fully prepared to drop out if I didn't start to feel better during the race. Based on the fact that I felt like crap, I left the HRM strap in my backpack. It wasn't going to tell me anything I wanted to know, and I had on a footpod to govern my pace objectively.

The weather was perfect. Sunny and 50 at the start, cloudy and 52 by the halfway point. There was a light cold wind, but nothing too bad. Miraculously, by the time I was in the starting corral I felt mostly OK. I headed out aiming to break 4 hours for the first time (distance running is not really my strong suit). I took the first half at a decent clip for me, 1:55:29. Other runners mentioned that the signature hill of the course was around mile 21, so I decided to hold an even pace until after that hill and then see how I felt.

By the time the hill was behind me, I felt really good and knew I was going to break 4 hours. So I had a decision to make: do I cruise in and finish easy or apply some pain and see what I could do the last 5 miles? This was my 5th marathon (1 standalone, 3 IM) and I have never been in the lucky position to make this decision before. It might never happen again. So I picked it up. The last 10k, which included the long hill, was 53 minutes and change. Finished at 3:50:00 on the nose for a PR and a 1 minute negative split.

Overall, I thought this race was well-organized. Aid stations with sports drink and water were at 2.5, 5.1, and then every 2 miles. 1 gu station at mile 20.5. Beautiful course with excellent and lively crowd support throughout--it honestly rivals Madison for the quality of spectators (and probably has a lot more spectators since the course point-to-point and not a double loop). Even with 11,000 runners, it was pretty easy to get up to speed within just a few blocks of the starting line.