Last 5-ish weeks of training, racing updates

I've been super lazy about this blog. Anyway, I'm too lazy to write out all my training since it hasn't been all that impressive mileage wise. Suffice to say, I've been trying to hit a lot more shorter tempo runs. I've done a LITTLE bit of speed work, but not that much. I've been doing about 1 consistent long run a week lately (20-ish miles) and my weekly mileage has been ~60 miles/week. I had plans to do a considerable amount last week, but things have been super busy, so I kept it pretty easy. I wanted to do another very long trainer about the same distance as that 39 mile DC run, but it rained the whole weekend and I didn't want to be all blistered up, so I skipped it and did speed work instead. Today I ran the National Marathon as a pacer, which was a pretty solid trainer for me. I was supposed to do a 3:15 and I ended up going slightly fast in the low 3:13s, but I was still pretty darn close to target, so it all worked out. The run left me pleasantly tired, but I'm feeling good enough that I'm probably going to hit a little bit more mileage so today can be 30+ miles overall. Speakin of racing, I ended up missing out on the Greenway 50k a few weeks back. I was really looking forward to the race, but a death in my family caused me to miss it for the funeral out in Michigan. It was nice to spend some time with my relatives, but the circumstances obviously weren't the best, so that wasn't the happiest of weekends. I'm debating how to train this upcoming week. 2 weeks from today is the American River 50. I'm in pretty good shape for it I think and my goal is to run sub 8 hours. I'm just debating whether I'll be better off going pretty hard this week or taking 2 relatively easy weeks. I have the feeling I'll be going medium to heavy mileage (75-80 miles) and then taking the next week pretty easy, but it's not yet set in stone. I still want to make sure I have a handful of good tempo runs in there, so the mileage could be a bit less due to the fairly strenuous pace of a lot of the runs.