Adam Reger | Freelance Writer

No looking back, no backing out now: the Pittsburgh Marathon is in six days, and I am in the chute. I’m looking forward to it, and ready, though I could be readier.

It’s been a weirdly anticlimactic last three weeks of training. I did my 18-mile run, and on the following Thursday’s 10-miler started to have lots of pain in my right knee. I finished that run and then began resting my knee, diagnosing myself with runner’s knee, a common enough overuse injury. I did a long run the next weekend of 8 miles, stopping when I felt twingeing in the knee, and that following Thursday I did 7 out of the prescribed 10 miles. Where I really lagged behind was in doing 12, the following Sunday, instead of the prescribed 20.

Since then I’ve actually gotten mostly back on track. The downside is that by the time my knee felt better, I was into the tapering part of my training schedule. In other words, I skipped the really long training run, and my 18-miler, now almost a month ago, will go on record as my longest training run. It would be worse if I hadn’t run marathons before, but I feel less than fully prepared. I’m not sure what else I could have done in this situation, though.

On the positive side, though, my legs feel strong and ready to run, and I’m looking forward to the race in a way I really didn’t in the lead-up to the Philly Marathon, which when it rolled around found me with tired, aching legs. I’m hoping that fresh legs outweigh the lack of doing a super-long training run. I’ve done some good cross-training this time around, and feel really good about setting a new personal best, ideally by dropping another ten or more minutes off my Philly time (4:01 or 4:02; I don’t remember it except to note that I would’ve broken four hours if it weren’t for the “.2” part of “26.2”).