Increasing speed and endurance simultaneously!

I have started my training for the Oslo marathon... so far I have been doing around 10km and I did 12.7km on saturday. The strategy this time around is to do temp runs... this entails running 1/6 th of the distance at a slow pace and then run 2/3rd of the distance 10% faster than the marathon goal and try to maintain the pace for the entire distance and then run the last 1/6th at a normal pace.

I started out by trying to run the first half of my run slower than the last half. I have accomplised that goal in my last 4 outings... the interesting observation is that I have increased my average pace to 5 minutes and 16 seconds per km which is about 30 seconds faster than my marathon pace goal!! I guess I need to see how much more I can push my body... of course I am not trying to kill myself doing this :)