carpenoctem - Congrats on the 5K! Sounds like you've discovered the love that is social running! It's a great part of it in my mind. Hope you're hooked now.

spaceboy - Looks like a good schedule to stick with. For me it looks to bounce between weekly mileage a bit too much but the 3 rest days on certain weeks might be nice too. I run the Bart Yasso Intermediate schedule. It did well by me for the Philly Marathon last year and I hope it can do well for me for this coming Vermont City one at the end of the month. The keys to it are the hill trainings on the front end and then transitioning into interval/speed trainings on the back end. It's a superb foundation of strengthening followed by speediness just before the race. I recommend it if you've done one or two marathons already and want to get faster (I beat my PR by at least 30 minutes on it):

http://runnersworld.coverleaf.com/ru...u1=friend#pg58