Take advantage of the drop bags so you can dress for wide temperature differences -- 40 at the start and 80 at the finish. You BETTER train on hills or you're going to HURT! Finally, this is about the twistiest course you'll ever run, and if you care about your finish time, you MUST run the tangents. I executed this pretty well and actually logged 26.25 miles on my GPS, which is pretty good because my last downhill marathon was almost 27.5 miles.