As incredible as it seems, manymarathoners perform their long runs at aspecific, slower-than-goalpace and then expect to completetheir marathons at a tempowhich is abouta minutepermilefaster!
Performance-wise, the winner is a pre-release version of Tower Technology's TowerJ compiler, which generates a native executable from pure Java code that runs almost 25 percent faster than the fastest Java interpreter, even when the interpreter has a just-in-time compiler.