Marathon distance

A couple of days ago, I was updating my running log and noticed that my cumulative distance for the month so far was 26.2 miles.

I tweeted it, mentioning that my cumulative time spent running that distance was 5:02:53, but my twitter followers are mostly not runners, and I don’t think any of them realized that, to a runner, 26.2 miles is a round number—the distance of the modern marathon.

It’s good for me to see that my short runs do accumulate to some significant miles. It’s been three weeks since I upped my long run to 3 miles, and I’ve started to get pretty anxious to stretch it out to 4 miles. But I once before pushed up my long runs a little too quickly at just about this point (so I could run in a 5.5 mile trail race), and in the process hurt my Achilles tendon—an injury that took more than 6 months to heal. Any little thing to motivate me to keep running the same distance until I’m ready to handle longer distances is good.

I am still boosting my overall distance, I’m just doing so very slowly. My weekly mileage for the last three weeks was 8.5, 8.8, and 8.9 miles. I’ve done 6.1 miles already this week, and will probably crack 9 miles (although I might not, because the forecast high for Thursday is 102℉, and I may just take a rest day).

Longer long runs will come. Just not quite yet.