Re-thinking my Long runs

In preparation of my mid-April marathon I've been obsessed by regaining my running base which was around 40K a week with 10K and 12K long runs. So after taking the whole month of December off for a silly toe injury, I hoped to just jump back to the point where I left off at week 2 of my intermediate training schedule. However, the 12K long run on Sunday put too much stress on my calves. Aerobically there was no problem and there seemed to be enough stamina to do proper cool-down and take the dog out for a 40min walk later in the day. Taking Mondays off wasn't enough and Tuesdays I ran in pain. I continued repeating week 6 during the month of January and in February I got nervous about my long runs. So I decided to lower mid-week averages and take that as recovery and prepare for increased long runs. I thought that if I could get my long runs to around 30K by the end of March I'd be ready for enduring 42.195 on race day.

Ignoring the 10% rule which is to prevent injury I ran 15K on valentines-day... it still hurts my right calf after one week. I posted my philosophy on the running times forum and got great advice from many kind people. As most, if not all, wrote that it would be better to build a base and forget about marathon racing in April, it gave me courage to give up my strive for running through pain in order to get race-ready. I knew it was difficult, and almost impossible to get physically ready by race-day in April, mentally I was (am) feeling very strong and ready to run the full marathon at any time.

Thanks to all you kind people out there, I have received your kind advise and will turn training back one nudge and contact the April marathon race committee to change my full marathon to a half marathon.

Last 10 days of running:

3-Feb	4.3K	25:30
5-Feb	5.0K	27:30
6-Feb	5.0K	25:00
7-Feb	12.8K	1:14:00
9-Feb	4.0K	21:40
10-Feb	6.0K	32:10
13-Feb	5.4K	28:40
14-Feb	15.0K	1:26:30
16-Feb	5.0K	29:00
17-Feb	8.0K	44:00