I've been worried about this race owing to a nagging knee-cap injury. I've had more or less swelling due to water-on-the-knee from an injury back in January where I slipped on a chartered sailboat in the BVIs and whacked my knee. It was swollen but okay when I ran the B&A marathon in March, but has gotten tighter and more sore in training since, especially going down hills. I had gotten to the point of walking downstairs sideways.

So, I went to the orthopod yesterday and got about 6cc of fluid drained (aspirated?) from the outside of my left kneecap. Looked like pee! After that, he injected 2ccs of cortisone. It felt better almost instantly. After I got up this morning, I was bouncing down the stairs to make coffe and was half-way down before I realized it had been at least a month since it had last been that easy. So now I'm all psyched for the marathon on Sunday. No pain, so no worries.

T-Minus 4 days, 15 hours, 25 or so minutes to the Baltimore and Annapolis Marathon, so I'm in my final week of tapering. I really haven't trained as much for this one as I should have, owing partly to this pesky kneecap injury suffered on a boat in the Virgin Islands. I had one 16 mile run at PR speeds and a 17 miler 2 days later, though slower. But I felt fine while running -- it was after that my kneecap hurt. So I took a week off and ran just a few warmup miles on the weekend. Well, my kneecap got all gushy with fluids. It's slowly receding (like my hairline).

So my plan (such as it is) is to start the marathon and check my knee at the half-way point. A cool thing about the B&A is that runners can decide to do the half, at the half-way point -- no earlier. So I really can postpone the decision until the last possible moment. And since I've done many runs further than 13.1 since the injury, I'm pretty confident about finishing that distance.

I've talked to a couple of trainer-types about this and they seem to feel that I probably didn't tear anything inside the knee and that this is more superficial. I hope so. And maybe that's just what I want to believe! So I'll start, maybe finish the half, maybe the whole, take some tylenol.

And then, as Toshi suggested, ice ice baby.

Well, we're now 3 weeks from the B&A marathon and I may have a problem. Two weeks back my wife and I spent a week on a chartered sailboat in the BVIs. I know, it's not a good thing to take a week off training, but sometimes you just have to buck up and do these things. Anyway, during a moment of weakness (not uncommon for me anymore), I mashed my knee into the cockpit coaming. It welled up pretty good, but then was better. Until now anyway. After my final training distance runs last week, my left kneecap is just plain sore. No swelling or anything and it didn't bother me while running at all.

Since this is supposed to be the first week of taper, I think I'll leave off running entirely for the next few days -- maybe until Thursday or Friday. Let it feel better. Then try something short and easy -- maybe 10-12 at a slow, easy pace. Of course my hard pace would seem slow (though maybe not easy) to anyone observing. So I mean true turtle slow. And hope this passes.