Marathon and Half-marathon Training

AREC (A Running Experience Club) marathon and half-marathon training for the Long Beach Marathon starts again tomorrow and I'm feeling apprehensive. So many questions that need to be answered. How will my ankles feel? Will they hold up to the gradually increasing mileage that is required to finish a half marathon five months from now? Will I have the mental toughness and concentration to go through long runs again? I haven't done any long runs in recent months aside from the five minute run one minute walk technique a couple of months ago. Provided my ankles hold up there is no doubt I can finish a half marathon that way. But what if I try to run continuously forgoing the one minute walk breaks? Am I still capable of doing it? It scares me that the tendon tear of last October might happen again. Right now I'm pretty content on being able to run non-stop for an hour or so. I don't really need to run another half-marathon if I don't want to. But it seems that I feel the need to challenge myself again. In the past, needing to challenge myself meant training for a full marathon. I know for sure that I can no longer withstand the pain of training for that. How about training to walk a full marathon? Thats a consideration but it would take so much time to walk a marathon at the pace I'm capable of, about six plus hours. So which training should I try to do? Right now, I don't really know. But tomorrow and every Saturday thereafter for the next five months, I will show up at training and try to find out what I'm really made out of. After all, if I don't try, I'll never know.
This was last years' photo from the Long Beach Half-marathon. As you can see, I'm running crooked because of the pain on my right ankle.