I don't care what strava or your GPS say. I am saying they are more often wrong than not. If you ran disney with a Jones counter do you think it would have measured 26.5?[/quote]

Before you go telling me again how smart you are, take a look at all the other people who ran that race at see what distances they ran (hint: there's about 500 GPS files on Strava for that race). Even the top runners clocked between 26.4 to 26.7 miles that day. With a clear path, like I had at Disney, it is very easy to add anywhere from .20 to .40 miles by not hitting the tangents on a curvy course. I'm also betting that a Jone counter would have clocked even higher.[/quote]

As you already know, but I will point it out to you, I never said anything about being smart or anything even close to that. You are just getting pissy b/c something was pointed out to you that you do not like. Maybe if you had been smart you would have run the tangents. By your own admission you had a clear path so actually seems pretty stupid not to run the tangents. Now here is where you can reply and tell me how you did not care to run the tangents b/c this was just a fun race for you and you were doing the Goofy challenge. Pretty Goofy thing to do, not running the tangents when there is nothing stopping you from doing it.
By the way. Congrats on your 26.5mi PR.

Your original comment was that either the course was measured wrong or the GPS device was inaccurate. I disagree with your comment. As almost 500 Strava files attest, It is very easy for people to run a fair distance more than the certified route on a curvy course. No matter how far anyone ran, it was still a 26.2 mile race. So, that's all you get credit for.

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What I do: http://app.strava.com/athletes/345699

Has the Hanson plan worked well. Not sure if I should follow this plan or the nike run app plan?

It's always a balance. Early in marathon training it is easy to go too hard, accumulating fatigue that will come back to haunt you later in the plan when the overall training load increases. And that is the opposite of what you'd want. You want to hit that key 4-6 weeks of heaviest training with the ability to nail most of the workouts. If you're too hard early, especially as an AGer who doesn't have that 80+ mile/week base that elite runners have, you'll start to carry fatigue into the key weekly workouts. Throttling back on 1 or 2 of these is not too bad, and probably a bit normal. But if you hit the most important section of your training plan and start dropping workouts or you start fudging paces because you're mentally and/or physically burned...you're setting yourself up for race failure, regardless of fitness.

On the other hand, you need to do enough early in the plan to ensure success later.

One thing I do now that I'm a bit older is constantly ask myself in training "If I keep going at this effort on the rest of this workout, am I going to be able to train tomorrow?" That usually keeps me in check when my legs feel "better" than the planned workout. It's absolutely ok to have workouts that feel like you didn't do enough even if you've executed the plan. Not every training session should leave you curled up in a misery ball.