[Buk]

I had a big huge long post, at the end of which I commented about Dave thnking he was long winded, but it went away when I submitted. This one will probably be put together much worse.

The McMillan calculator can only be trusted so much when projecting paces for longer events, it assumes a specifically trained distance. Running a 50 minute 10K doesnt mean you can finish a marathon in even 6 hours, espically if 10 is your longest run to date. A lot of your training time before the marathon will be spent increasing distance, which may not yeild the speed increases you expect. A marathon is a lot further than a half, it doesn't get hard until about mile 20 something. So depending on how much time is between your half and full, you may not be able to drop your goal pace much, as you will be increasing mileage. If you have the capacity for a full, a half would be a good current pace predictor, and you could train for a faster full in the future, but some of your time will be spent developing capacity rather than improving speed. There may be some speed improvements over the prediction, but not as much as if you already had the capacity for a full.

There are tons of planning guides out there, but most are desigend for runners. Runners who are not expected to spend a lot of training energy on weightlifting. The programs all have the same basic parts. If you want to follow a written program for your full marathon, any of them will probably work well. A beginner's finish program may be the best choice to allow time and energy for however much weight training you want to do. But even the ones layed out for a specific goal pace are designed for a wide audience in which you may fall at either end of the spectrum of adaptation, recovery, and improvements to the training program. Otherwise you can study a few of them and learn the basics that are common in every program then decide how much running you want to do. Along with your experience training for the half, and experiences you can skim from weight lifing runners like Dave and kmWest, I am sure you can make things work. Your plan does not need to be perfect, just have the basics; at least until you become very competitive, at which point you will be the teacher.

With that said, I don't think it is a bad thing to adjust your goal time as your training progresses. But even that may not mean that you need to change your routine. It may mean that you take particularly well to exactly what you are doing. The half and 25K will make great reality checks as long as you run them smart. Then as your mileage gets up while training for the full, a few 5 or 10Ks will help keep you in check, while knowing that you have the capacity to go long. But my thought is that if you are feeling good, up the pace or distance until that feeling first starts to fade; then drop back and look for the balance point.

I even forgot my main points from the original post, but I think I said something in there.