Welcome

You are allowed to feel halfway decent from time to time :-)

Yeah, there's cumulative fatigue from a marathon buildup, but you did take last week as a bit of a down week... maybe that actually served a good purpose?

The idea that you have to be exhausted all the time to be training well is just a way for people to justify over-training.

I go back and forth. I want to challenge myself as much as my 36 year old body can handle but I don't want to do anything stupid.

I am certain that if I hadn't backed off last week I would be in a world of hurt right now but I probably overreacted and the lesson from that wasn't that I needed to cut mileage. My guess is that it was a combination of slightly less sleep on a more erratic schedule combined with increased frequency, intensity and time. A clear recipe for disaster.

I need to be smarter in my approach and continue to listen to my body while not overreacting to how I feel on a given day like you have said.

You say you need to be smarter at the end of your comment, but then look at the two paragraphs above... you clearly understand what's going on and the risks/benefits of intensity, mileage, etc and how they relate to all the other "stuff" going on in life. You can't separate any of it... everything interacts with and has an effect on everything else.

Would an extra 15 miles have been worth it last week? You might have still been fine this week, but maybe not. You have to take risks in training to get the best of yourself... but if you're somewhat patient, they can be very calculated risks with a high probability of payoff.

You are already much, much wiser when it comes to this stuff than most runners with your level of ambition.