It’s three weeks until the Seattle Marathon and it’s on my mind a lot. It’s my first full marathon and I’ve been training hard. Today was my last super long run in preparation, after which is the 3 week “taper” stage in which the training runs are scaled down.

I ran for 4 hours today and figure my distance was somewhere between 24 and 25 miles. In case you don’t know, a marathon is 26.2 miles so I almost ran one today. And I think I overdid it a bit. I learned some things, too.

One, I think it’s going to be very hard for me to run a 4 hour marathon. To do so I need to run right around 9 minute miles. By the end of today’s training run, the best I could muster was 10 minute miles. And the reason for this is my ankles.

I played a lot of basketball when I was younger and, unfortunately, did some damage to my ankles. In today’s run, that really came back to haunt me as my ankles really started to burn. 6 hours later, my left ankle is very stiff. I’ll need to focus on how to treat my ankles well in the next 3 weeks.

Today’s photo has nothing to do with the post but I picked it anyway since I’m writing about myself. It’s better than a picture of my left ankle, right?