Yesterday I completed my fourth and final marathon of the year at the Seattle Marathon. My time was 4:19:12, which is 18 seconds slower than my fastest time. Lately, I’ve been working 65-70 hours a week while sleeping 4 hours most nights. All things considered, this was a very good race.

Earlier this year, I was riding the runner’s high from the Rock ‘n’ Roll marathon. I was making such excellent progress with healing from my Complex PTSD, that an ambitious goal of running 4 1/2 marathons in six months seemed like a great idea. Of course, five minutes after signing up for all of those races, the weight of everything sank in and terror washed over me. Maybe I was in over my head. What kind of mad person does something like that?

Slowly, the fear turned into excitement. I get to run another marathon!

Seattle Marathon’s 50th anniversary

The Seattle Marathon was my last marathon. This race is known to be a tough course–it’s cold, dark, wet, and hilly. Training for it was much easier this time, however. Instead of building up the mileage, I was maintaining it through the other three races.

The marathon went quite smoothly, despite how overwhelming things have been. I glided through the course, occasionally throwing back shots of water and slurping energy gels. I don’t remember some of the course, because my mind often goes on auto-pilot, similar to driving. My favorite part was going through Gasworks Park, a public park that is reminiscent of the Victorian-inspired steampunk genre (at least, for me).

There weren’t as many memorable hills this time. I do recall a long hill slowing me down around Mile 23, but that was quickly forgotten about. The course very gently sloped downhill, and I sprinted the last .2 miles towards the finish line.

Treat yo’self

Running a marathon burns 2,500-3,000 calories, so my best friend and I went to Araya’s Place for their all-you-can-eat vegan Thai buffet.

This was followed by a Lush bath bomb. These are like an alka seltzer for your tub.

One thing at a time

The secret to doing this many marathons was to focus on one race at a time. If I had paid more attention to how many more I had left to do, then it would been overwhelming. All of that energy would have been lost from worrying about how much more there was to do. The best I could do was stay very present and focus on the race at hand. This also translates when running a marathon. Instead of seeing how many miles there were left to run, I only focused on the next mile. This made it much easier to handle.

Earlier this year, I thought that I was in over my head about running several full marathons in a short amount of time, but now… Now I finally reached the last one. Everything else was put on pause, because this goal was important to me. Something like this requires a tremendous amount of faith, which is so important when it comes to healing from C-PTSD. In the past, something like this seemed impossible. But I made it. And I totally took this last race on.