It’s two weeks until my next marathon, the inaugural Vancouver USA Marathon. (Vancouver is in Washington, right across the Columbia River from Portland.) Ideally, then, I would already have been tapering some this weekend. Things have been far from ideal, though: it is only in the last few weeks that I have begun to feel confident once more in my left knee. I hadn’t done any runs longer than 15 miles since Boston. And last weekend we were vacationing in Ashland. Which was great, but even doing the couple of shorter runs I did manage to squeeze in (a 6.5 and a 7, both in the beautiful hills up above Lithia Park) felt heroic.
So here I am with two weeks left and I ran twenty miles yesterday. Which also happened to be the hottest day out of the last 273 in Portland. The high was in the low 80s, which isn’t normally that bad, but after a very long cold and wet spring, my body wasn’t ready for it.
Knowing it would be warm, and that I wasn’t in great shape, and that I didn’t have a lot of time to recover, I made sure to run the 20 miles very slowly — I averaged ten minute miles. That’s not quite as slow as it sounds, because there were a lot of hills along the way, but it was still pretty pokey.
I ran along a lot of unfamiliar roads and paths, including the weird bike paths along 26 between 217 and the zoo. Exploring is fun. My body held up well, especially my knee. Looks like I’ll definitely be running Vancouver.
