Three years later

This past weekend, I ran the Savannah Women’s Half Marathon. It was really hard (but also a lot of fun), much warmer than expected (though thankfully not very humid), and I finished 1 full minute faster than my Ath Half 2022 time last October.

Cathryn–who did most of the groundwork logistics for this trip, and I can’t thank her enough for that–got us a beautiful Airbnb in the historic part of town, within walking distance from pretty much everything, including the Start and Finish lines. She also set up reservations for dinner for us the night before at an awesome sushi restaurant, Current. The vibe was perfect, and the food was delicious.

We didn’t sleep very well that night, but that’s pretty much par for the course the night before a big race. The fact that we didn’t have to first put a toddler to bed and then wake her up, dress her, and feed her the next morning was pretty clutch.

The race started off with the 5K (which Cathryn ran) and the Half (which I ran) running together for the first few miles, so that was pretty neat to be able to run together for the first bit.

I hung with the 2:15 pace group for the first half of the race before feeling as though I hit a wall, but was still happy to have held on for that long. The rest of my race was a walk/run, trying to run every other song on my playlist. Cathryn found me around mile 11 and ran with me for a bit–which was a godsend–though it was then I realized: my breathing was completely fine. It wasn’t exactly a revelation to know that my mental fitness was lightyears behind my physical fitness, but it crystallized for me in that moment. Of course my muscles were absolutely shot by then, but I managed to run the whole time Cathryn was with me.

The finisher’s chute was pretty neat, especially on a course that didn’t have as much crowd support as I was used to from Ath Half. I came in right around 2:31:30 and promptly fell on my back on the shady grass of Forsyth Park and waited for Cathryn to home in on my still-active Strava beacon.

After the race, Cathryn and I prioritized “doing whatever we wanted to do,” which for us often involves day-in-the-life type touring around: walking, dropping in on coffee shops and book stores, checking out a few landmarks, and generally soaking in the surroundings. We capitalized on a few restaurant recommendations from Savannah natives–all of which were excellent–walked through Forsyth Park, read books at a coffee shop, dropped in on a bookstore where cats lived, and of course sampled Leopold’s Ice Cream. This whole trip, while three years in the making, was effectively our 9-year wedding anniversary (technically, it’s Wednesday, but close enough) and only the second multi-day trip the two of us have ever taken together since our daughter was born.

Savannah is beautiful, y’all. We got really lucky with weather–the humidity can get stifling, but this past weekend it felt dry–and the biting sand gnats are a constant annoyance. But it was a gorgeous weekend for a race, and a lovely weekend for a couple who have been together for 17 years this fall (!!!) to get away, relax, and run together–one of the things that really brought us together.

Ok. Now. Some multi-year context that’s been rattling around my head since last October. Ahemahemahem.

I threw together a quick Python plot using my monthly mileage off Garmin Connect, going back to Oct 2019 when I was training for the Chickamauga Marathon.

It’s pretty apparent: in the time between March 2020 and August 2020, my running went from 100+ miles per month to… basically 0. In fact, August and September were exactly 0, with some activity coming back in October. To be fair, my daughter was born in that span of time, but that alone doesn’t wholly explain the sheer cliff before it, nor the fact that my running still hasn’t recovered since.

You see, dear reader: I had registered to run the Savannah Women’s Half Marathon in April 2020. That was going to be my next race after the Chickamauga Marathon, my next opportunity to showcase my continuing improvements in the half after running a sub-1:45 Swamp Rabbit Half in Feb 2019 (I missed Ath Half in Oct 2019 because of my marathon training; just couldn’t fit the race into my schedule).

Savannah in April 2020 was also going to be my wife and I’s babymoon: a weekend getaway and race together ahead of the arrival of our daughter. We’d never visited Savannah together, and we wanted to run a race together before pregnancy made my wife too uncomfortable to run longer distances.

Then, suffice to say, COVID hit. Along with the rest of, well, everything, the race was canceled. My running fell off a cliff as stress mounted: job-related, COVID-related, and with impending baby arrival preparations. But even after my daughter was born, COVID stressors persisted as people refused to take even the most basic precautions against its spread, and my job increasingly shrugged its shoulders in response to some of the most expert voices in public health and epidemiology, ceding to volume space previously intended for veracity.

Since then, running for me has changed. Dramatically. In fact, it’s literally been unprecedented: I’ve never worked as hard or long to get through “easy” runs than I have in the past year+. I have no illusions that a lot of this is privilege speaking: I was always athletic and genetically blessed in that regard, and so when I “started” running back in 2010 I still had a very athletic base from which to draw and therefore most of my initial races, while slow for me at the time, were much faster than what I can do now.

Last October’s Ath Half (I never got around to writing a race report for that one) was a 2:32 finish time, by far my slowest half marathon time; previously, my slowest time had been my very first half during Thanksgiving in 2010, when I finished around 2:09. Four years later I’d record what still stands as my half marathon PR, a 1:41 at Pittsburgh.

Cool finishers badges!

I finished Savannah in 2:31, almost exactly 1 minute faster than last October’s Ath Half. This particular event certainly had its own challenges: it was very, very flat, which seems appealing in a vacuum, but means you’re using the same exact muscles with absolutely minimal variations in form for the entire event, something which is highly unusual for most runners unless they spend a lot of time on treadmills; it was also much warmer than I’ve been accustomed to from training, with the event starting at 68F where, for the past couple months, that’s often been the day’s high temperature.

Then there were other factors out of my control but no less impactful: work has been particularly stressful the last few weeks with the start of weekly seminars as part of an NSF grant I’m on and a pair of graduate students preparing their theses and defenses later this month; also, work began two weeks ago on long-stalled master bathroom renovations which, when completed, would give us use of our shower for the first time in over three years, but in the meantime has effectively taken our bedroom entirely out of play (far too dusty) and upended all of our at-home routines… not to mention our sleep.

Actually stopped mid-race to take this photo. GO SAVANNAH BANANAS.

Finally, there’s also the unconfirmed factor of long COVID. Back in December, COVID finally caught up with our family during our holiday trip to see extended family in Arizona; I tested positive on NYE night. Since then, about 30-40% of my runs have involved extreme chest tightness in the first mile that, frankly, feels like drowning: I simply can’t get enough air. It’ll subside after about a mile, but often precipitates multiple walk breaks within that first mile, and absolutely tanks my mental state–which has an outsized downstream effect on longer runs, tiring me out faster. I’ve been incorporating some additional stretches that open up my torso, and adding some breathing exercises before starting any runs, and they may very well be helping. It’s also entirely possible that this isn’t long COVID at all, but it’s difficult if not impossible to tease out.

I know some folks have been hit a hell of a lot harder by long COVID than chest tightness that goes away after 10-15 minutes of physical activity, and my intention here is not to minimize what they’re going through. I just want to contextualize the full extent of my experience trying to get back into running form… or, perhaps more poignantly, contextualize my experience in learning to re-contextualizing my own understanding of what “running form” actually means.

It all equates to a very uneven running comeback, and one which has required a lot–a LOT–of grace. I haven’t figured out how to balance work (which is changing, so that’s added complication, on top of what was already stressful), parenting, running, sleep, and–for lack of a better term–“things and activities that make me feel whole” (hardware/software tinkering, reading, gaming, cleaning, etc). I am still very, very burned out; I’m recovering, but it’s very obvious very quickly when I’ve pushed beyond what my body is ready for, and that can crop up unexpectedly and throw a huge and immensely frustrating wrench in well-laid plans. And it’s frustrating, oh so frustrating, to think about “how fast I used to be”–even though that kind of comparison is textbook toxic, and I know that–and then try to motivate myself to take even one more step.

There’s been a lot of anger, frustration, and self-ridicule in the past year; a lot of doubt, uncertainty, and questioning whether things will improve, or whether I can even find satisfaction with how far I’ve already come:

• It’s hard to see from the figure at the top, but March 2023’s 64.55 miles is the highest monthly mileage I’ve recorded since June 2020, which is arguably when the wheels started falling off
• This training cycle is the most consistent week-to-week I’ve had in a long, long time: every week since January 23 (9 weeks straight) has been double-digit mileage. Even my Ath Half 2022 training wasn’t that consistent.
• I had a 20-mile week during this training cycle that wasn’t even a race week!

These are milestones that show huge improvements from even 6 months ago. It’s just… easy to lose perspective.

As for what comes next: I honestly don’t know.

We’re heading into the hottest part of the year, and while I’m grateful to no longer have to change outfits halfway through the day, I really struggle with the heat in the dead summer, even aside from running. I do want to establish a regular weightlifting cadence, and to that end Cathryn and I are planning to finally pull the trigger on a family Y membership. We’ve been mulling this one for quite awhile, but with Cathryn’s weightlifting outstripping the home dumbbells’ weights, and having canceled access to our university gym almost a year ago, it’d be really nice to have access to a fully-stocked gym again–and one that several of our friends (also with small children) highly recommend. I know it’s controversial, but I really like treadmills as a tool for training: they came in particular handy in Pittsburgh when there was 2ft of snow outside, and they’ve come in handy here in Athens when it was 75F at 6am. I’m also looking into dietitians who work specifically with athletes–and who eschew the toxicity of “diet culture”–to see if that will help.

Of course, all of this is predicated on some availability of time, money, and bandwidth. As I said earlier, I already feel like I can’t keep up with everything; how would I fit regular weightlifting into my weekly regimen? How will I have the bandwidth to put my diet under a microscope for a long period of time? Are we going to be able to afford any of this (especially with the aforementioned job change)?

I don’t have the answers to these questions right now, but maybe that’s ok for the time being. After all, one thing we runners are too good at is moving the goalposts: regardless of whether we missed our race’s goal or nailed it, we immediately move on to the next race and what those goals and training plans should look like. Maybe, just for now, it’s ok to leave that a little ambiguous.

Believe me: I can hear my therapist’s voice in my head, asking me if the reason I run is numbers related–is the whole point to run more miles? run faster miles? look good in race photos (see below)? or is there some other reason, what it could possibly be, hmmmmm.

To that end, please enjoy these awful, awful race photos of me. The very last might be my favorite: the photographer caught me on a down-beat and I look about two seconds from melting into the street.

And hey, maybe I’ll blog here more often 🙂

Pandemic Running

Why hello there, neglected blog *hugs* Guess it’s just you and me, eh?

In case you’ve been living under a vacuum-sealed rock for the past three months, there’s been a worldwide outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 and its subsequent viral infection, COVID-19. Georgia’s stats haven’t looked great, and it’s still too soon to tell what kind of an effect the phased re-opening is having, but here we are for the foreseeable future.

Source: Georgia Department of Public Health

Just before the country shut down sometime in March, I was busy training for the Savannah Women’s Half Marathon in early April, en route to–hopefully!–a second crack at the full marathon in as many years sometime later this year. Obviously the former didn’t happen–the race was postponed to November with virtual participation an option up to the physical November race date. I still haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to be doing, but suffice to say, immediate plans went up in smoke.

In the four weeks leading up to the shutdown, I was struggling a bit to find a rhythm in the new spring semester, but I was still pretty much universally killing the workouts and long runs–a clear sign that, while not perfect, training was definitely going well.

Missed a couple of Monday easy runs, but was otherwise crushing the Tuesday workouts and Saturday long runs.

The next four weeks were, in retrospect, surprisingly productive on the running front, though I suspect pure inertia had more to do with it than anything: it was a plank of familiarity in a sea of unknowns. I managed a 36.7 mile week the first weekend of April, when I was supposed to have raced in Savannah.

And then the wheels really came loose.

Ouch.

Two workouts, two long runs, in four weeks. The end of a semester that felt like it had barely begun–courtesy of a total and near-instantaneous shift from in-person to completely online barely three weeks prior–hit like a freight train. Along with, y’know, the existential weight of surviving during a worldwide pandemic.

Running was burning the candle at both ends. I couldn’t pry myself out of bed in the mornings to get a run in, but neither could I fall asleep at night after an exhausting day of existing.

I wish I could say there was a silver bullet to maintaining a running regimen during a global pandemic: some kind of magic wand that consistently carves out time and energy to make runs happen and enjoyable. Instead, there was a lot of frustration, a lot of doubt, a lot of anger and resentment and questioning whether this was really something I should be putting my time and energy into trying to make happen.

Was I just being lazy? Or would getting out there do more harm than good? Was this something I should push through, training myself in the process and building my mental fortitude? Or was I priming myself for a massive burnout down the road? What about my physical fitness? What about how exercise positively affects brain function?

All questions without obvious answers. Also, all pointless spinning.

There is no silver bullet. But there are the following tenets:

Get enough sleep. I can’t emphasize this one enough. Loss of sleep is one of the first symptoms of a higher stress baseline, and it cascades into literally everything else. So this is the first thing to address. If you’re not getting enough sleep, the effectiveness of all other downstream mitigation strategies will be blunted at best, utterly negated at worst. Biggest bang for buck is right here.

Prioritize. And be honest about it. These two points go hand-in-hand, because what we sometimes think of in a single instant as our top priority actually has more leeway than we think. What really is your top priority right? What really needs to get done? And what else can wait?

Do what makes your heart sing. Those other high-priority things with some flex to them can wait until you’ve recharged a bit. Yes, you would do more harm than good by trying to get them done before you’ve rested. I’ve run on 1 hour of sleep before; it’s always utterly unproductive at best, and though this thankfully hasn’t happened to me, it could result in a devastating injury because of my fatigued state at worst. If a nap is going to be what helps in the long run, take a nap. If it’s playing a video game, play a video game. If it’s reading a book, read a book. The other stuff can wait.

My coach and I, in lieu of the half marathon, had planned on a 10K time trial on May 9 as a way to maintain some structure and keep up some motivation. Given the difficulty I had training through April, I asked to push the time trial back a week (see above: Prioritize). As a result, I got a complete week of training in last week–all 33 miles, including a solid workout and a crushed long run. This week, I’ve been on track, and we have a plan for tomorrow’s time trial. I won’t be setting any landspeed records–that 42-minute PR is going to be waiting awhile longer–but it’s giving me something to shoot for.

Wish me luck! And you can bet there’ll be a nap afterwards 🙂

The marathon is like a metaphor

In that both words have eight letters and start with “m”.

It was fairly early in 2019 when I made the decision to run my first marathon in over four years. In receiving an award notification for the NSF CAREER in late mid-December 2018, I was now reasonably confident I would sail through my tenure approval process and be given the chance to stick around for foreseeable and moderately unforeseeable future. With the 2015 Big Sur marathon retreating further into the rearview mirror, I wanted to get back into the long distance game before I completely forgot how to fuel for anything over 13 miles.

I also, genuinely, wanted to take another crack at the distance that has vexed me all three times I’ve attempted it: a slow-burn meltdown in 2012 at Philly, a lithium-ion crash at the 2013 Marine Corps, and a head cold at the aforementioned 2015 Big Sur that yielded a brilliant 20 miles followed by a final 10K march so miserable I literally don’t remember it.

I knew, having already gone through the 2016 and 2017 stretch of learning how to run all over again, that I couldn’t do this by myself. Even with The Lady’s marathon expertise, I felt professional guidance was a necessity. The Lady put me in touch with Caitlin of Fearless Feet Running, and after we returned from Ireland back in May, we hit the ground running–literally and figuratively.

That process was anything but smooth. As much as I would flail and rage against it, life still happened.

Monthly mileage totals over the training cycle.

June was brutal, but relatively successful: with the exception of a missed race (just couldn’t make Rabun happen this year), I hit the mileage goals. The quality workouts, however, were another story: I was having to cut back on difficulty on almost every one–a sprint here, a rep there. The heat and humidity were already at their worst and I just wasn’t acclimated. A lovely trip to the mountains with dear friends helped break up the cycle a bit and generally relax while still acclimating.

By comparison, July knocked me on my ass. While I did manage to finally halt my four-year slide at the Peachtree Road Race and clock a faster time than last year, it was still comfortably above 50 minutes; the halcyon days of southern summer swelter had arrived in force, and simply stepping outside required Herculean strength and resolve. I also had to deal with a small twinge in my knee that took me out of running for a week. Certainly didn’t do my ability to acclimate any favors.

Flyover at the start of the 50th Peachtree Road Race.

Morning tempo workout at SciPy in Austin, TX.

Took a picture almost identical to this in February of 2017, also while out on a run.

Melting post-workout in the Athens, GA summer heat.

Nighttime in the Tucson, AZ desert is actually perfect for running.

It was raining and miserable on the morning of Rabun.

This nugget I’m carrying has hiking interleaved in her DNA.

In August, we started the formal 16-week marathon training program. By this time I had a “base”–that elusive concept referring to one’s baseline abilities and assumptions that we’re starting some epsilon away from scratch–and instead of maintaining weekly mileage while increasing difficulty, I could start alternating each week with increased mileage and increased workout difficulty. Of course, the start of fall classes did nothing to help the process go smoothly, and the fact that I was slated to teach the single course I was least prepared for (of the five I’ve ever taught before) ensured that this month felt completely chaotic.

…at least, until September rolled around and left no doubt that it would be perennial contender for Most F*#@ing Absurd Month. My quality workouts actually went well, but I had two spectacular blow-ups in long runs this month: one was entirely my fault (pro-tip, don’t drink margaritas the night before a long run) while the other I blame on the still-Venusian weather. Real life did a real number, too–The Lady and I traveled three of the four weekends in the month: one to West VA for a friend’s wedding (with a stop the night before at UNC Chapel Hill…not exactly “on the way”), one to Pittsburgh for my first-ever invited seminar and to visit The Lady’s brother and his family, and a third to D.C. to serve on my first-ever NSF review panel.

I’ll always love Pittsburgh.

This ended up being a solid workout run through the D.C. suburbs, despite being at nearly the end of my physical rope.

We may have been out in the middle of Nowhere, West VA, but they did have miles and miles of rails-to-trails that were perfect for a 16-mile long run.

Running through the UNC Chapel Hill campus early in the morning.

That last trip to D.C. was at the end of September and start of October, which was also supposed to coincide with my first 20-mile long run of the cycle, but I was so burned out at this point I ended up getting sick and not running a single mile of that 20. In the subsequent weeks of October my running improved considerably, but at this point we were solidly in Peak Month and everything was hard. The shortest long run was 18 miles, and the weekly mileage regularly topped 45. While the weather was slowly cooling off, we still had frequent mornings with temperatures over 70F and above 90% humidity. And despite out-of-town travel dropping to zero, I was now in perpetual catch-up mode at work.

Which brings us, at last, to November. The “Taper Tantrums” are in full swing: I can fall asleep anytime, anywhere; everything hurts, even parts which have no reason to hurt; short runs feel terrible, and longer runs slightly better. I feel completely tapped out at work, and when I get home it’s all I can do to keep from scarfing down literal pounds of leftover Halloween candy and avoiding egg nog like the plague, lest it turn my blood to lead and all but guarantee that my marathon will end within the first mile.

I honestly don’t know what to expect from this marathon, partly because I haven’t had a chance to discuss with Caitlin yet, but also because of the simple fact that it’s been 4.5 years since my last and life has been so life in the last six months that anything between Phawkes’ 3:20 predictions (“Phawkes” is the name of my Garmin Fēnix) and my standing 4:17 PR seems well within the realm of possible, even plausible.

FiveThirtyEight linked their marathon pace calculator from last year in time for this year’s NYC Marathon, and for giggles I punched in the information they wanted: 35 miles/week (average) training, a 1:44:52 half marathon time on a moderate course (Swamp Rabbit in Feb 2019), and a 51:29 10K on a hard course (Peachtree this past July). Here’s what they thought:

Courtesy of the FiveThirtyEight marathon calculator.

Seems as reasonable as any. But enough with reasonable.

Every fall it seems like the conceptual thunderdome of “which is a better metaphor for life: football or marathons” crops up. I spent a significant portion of my formative years having the football metaphor drilled into me: the gridiron as a stand-in for all the challenges and uphill battles you’ll fight on a daily basis, with the guarantee that you’ll get knocked down repeatedly, and the mark of a successful player is the ability to get back up to [likely] get knocked down again and [maybe] make a play.

16 years later (jfc I’m old), I embrace that metaphor with considerably less enthusiasm. While I don’t think it’s outright wrong, it’s definitely misleading: there are only so many times you can get back up before trying again could, literally as well as figuratively, be dangerous to your health. To that end, I’ve increasingly found the marathon to be the superior metaphor: it’s a long grind, especially with the training, and has its share of ups and downs. Sometimes it will feel great, other times you’ll wish you’d stayed in bed. There’s no shortcut–I’ve found one can “fake” their way through a half marathon without training, but with a full it’s just impossible unless you’ve put in the time and effort. Critically, you can’t put it all on the line at the very beginning; it’s not a sprint, so you better go out hard but make sure you’ve got something left for when the going gets really hard.

Georgia Tech’s 2019 Homecoming game against Pittsburgh! We lost. Badly.

I may be training for a marathon, but I’m also actively running one. I nailed a huge PR last December and took some time to recuperate a bit. Unfortunately, this fall, I attacked the hills a bit before I was fully rested and it hurt like hell. It’ll make me stronger down the stretch, but only if I take care of myself now. But in that recover-while-training synchrony, I’ve been frustrated by what feels like simply treading water: workouts where I’ve had to cut out reps because it was just too humid out, or long runs I had to bag because I was under the weather. Meanwhile, I’ve yet to get further than a week ahead in my teaching, I’ve pushed a couple grant deadlines, and I outright canceled my appearance at a top conference in October. In isolation, these felt like misses in my training, milestones I should have been able to hit but didn’t. Was I not training hard enough? Did I need to push even more? Maybe I could make up for it by cramming in more later?

It’s crazy how often the same identical neuroses crop up in marathon training and everyday life, and are handled oppositely. I get a small tweak in my knee? Take a week off, no worries, especially since it’s early in training; Big grant deadline? Push through it, pull an all-nighter if you have to, then back to work first thing in the morning because I haven’t made the lecture slides yet. Conversely: three weeks in a row of travel, feeling sick, sure I’ll take a day off from work; three weeks in a row of travel, feeling sick, but if I skip this 20-mile run it’s the end of the f#@!ing world!

I love what I do; I also hate my job with every fiber of my being. So, too, do I love and hate running marathons. Maybe I’ll give marathons a slight edge in sum because I often run to escape work, but never the other way around. Also because I can eat a lot more donuts while running marathons than I can sitting at my desk.

This is all to say: I’ve really, really missed this grindy, miserable, wonderful event, and I’m excited and terrified to see what I can do on Saturday morning. But no matter what happens, I’ll feel better again, I’ll have fun, and I’ll have the world’s best cheering section the whole way.

The Lady sat through a one-sided (not our side) football game. That’s true love.

It’s 2019, and another year over

Boy I’m glad I didn’t make blogging more often a resolution in last year’s new year’s post. That would have been embarrassing, given I only posted here seven times!

…oh. Welp.

2018, on a whole, was actually a solid running year. More solid than it’s been in… years.

• 1,518.92 miles. Which is strange, because Strava thinks I ran exactly 1,500. As far as I can tell, there was some bug in the database tally that mistook my first week of 2018 as some random week in December 2017. Technical wibbly-wobbly aside, the bottom line is that I had my second-best annual mileage, ever.
• 236,891 calories burned. How many donuts is that? Not nearly enough, I say.
• 248+ hours. That’s literally over 10 straight days of running/walking/hiking. Not too shabby.
• 10 out of 12 months with 100+ miles. That’s one better than last year, though interestingly the mileage differential from 100 those two months was almost exactly the same as the total mileage differential over last year’s *three* sub-100 months. So, though I missed fewer times this year, when I did miss, I missed by more.

Weird. But still really, really solid.

What’s especially fantastic is that, by any objective measure, I crushed two of my three goals from last year’s review post:

• Broke 1,500 miles! See above.
• Nailed sub-1:45! Delivered a beautiful and much-desired 1:44:33 at the 2018 Chickamauga Battlefield half marathon.

I’m still reeling from that half marathon. Yeah, it’s still a good four minutes off my PR, but that is literally the closest I’ve gotten since moving to Athens. I couldn’t be happier about it. I had so much fun at that race!

Other accomplishments of note in 2018:

• I entered 13 races in 2018. That may not seem like an eye-catcher, but if you check out the Races page (where I keep track of all my race results), you’ll notice the number of races I participated in dropped considerably in 2016-2017 (8 in both years, compared to 14 in 2015 and 16 in 2014). It’s great to be an active racer again (especially since I’m now on the Athens Fleet Feet Racing Team!).
• Ran four half-marathons, all under 1:50. I haven’t run four half marathons in one year since 2015, and haven’t delivered a sub-1:50 shutout since… ever!
• Set an 8K PR of 35:53. Athens seems to like 8Ks more than Pittsburgh, so we’ve been running them more often, and I went ahead and made them an official category of PRs I’m tracking. And, well–I nailed a PR at the Give Thanks 8K on Thanksgiving morning!
• Ran our first trail race ever, and then ran two more for good measure! Technically the first trail race was the 15K in March at Lake Chapman. After that, we ran the Rabun Trail half over the summer, which was brutal but so awesome. We caught the bug, and ran the Helen Holiday trail half in December. We’ll definitely be doing more trail races in the future!
• Participated in the annual holiday Beer Mile again! I vastly improved my time, from last year’s 8:55 to this year’s 8:28. Like last year, however, I still came in second place, though I did demolish last year’s winner. This year’s winner was not even in the same category–he beat me by a good 20 seconds or so, and was clearly sandbagging. Dunno if I’ll ever win the event if he keeps coming back, but it was still quite a lot of fun 🙂

Lake Chapman 15K

Rabun Trail Half

Helen Holiday Half

All that makes it sound like 2018 was sunshine and rainbows. It was definitely the best year I’ve had since moving to Athens, hands down. I also–KNOCK ON WOOD–didn’t really suffer a major injury; there was a week in February I took off due to a pull in my knee, and it cleared up immediately. The writing goal–my third goal for 2018–was a fantastic anchor in my work/life balance the first half of the year.

But it kind of came crashing down over the summer. Part of it was absolutely the brutal online summer course I was teaching. Even though it was the third year in a row, it was far and away the most difficult iteration, and the one that convinced me that this wasn’t something I could keep doing.

But the other part, the part that really shook us both for months, was that we had to say goodbye to our dear 18-year old tabby, Lily.

The Lady had adopted Lily as a tiny kitten and known her all her life. I was only introduced when she was 6, but after an initial period of inspection, Lily accepted me. Even though I grew up with cats, Lily was my first cat. All of July went by in a haze, and our running fell off quite a bit.

We started going for a lot of evening walks, a habit which we still pick up here and there. Our trail running picked up a lot (as every road run just felt awful and tedious), and we met a new Athens runner, Laura, who started graduate school at UGA and was game for pretty much any run or workout we could come up with. We kept the racing schedule fun, varying the distances and locations, pushing during training when we wanted to, and pulling back when weren’t feeling it.

I visited the Oiselle shop in Seattle during a December conference 🙂

The variety has helped. It continues to help. It’s something I want to carry into 2019:

• 1,600 miles. This is no small feat for me: the mighty 2014 running year was just a touch over 1,600 as well. But it speaks of expectations regarding my next goal…
• Return of the marathon! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is my fervent hope to participate in some kind of fall marathon! I’ve no idea which one, though I am looking at a couple of regional fulls (Richmond and Chickamauga are at the top of the list), so stay tuned! I don’t really have any goals other than to actually finish… but of course, it’d be great to finally come in under 4 hours.
• Daily core/yoga. In doing some experimenting it’s become clear that daily yoga is a bit out of my reach. And core work is that frustrating thing that gets dropped at the first sign of trouble. But so far in 2019 I’ve managed to get 10-15 minutes of core work in each day (except for long runs, because oy), and 2x/week of yoga seems to be working as well.

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2019!

What day is it?!

So my last update was in July. That’s… something.

Also, ❤ Robin Williams

Predictably (in hindsight at least), September was a shitshow. Work has since calmed down a little bit, but is still moving at a pretty brisk pace, so this is more of an update-for-the-sake-of-updating than an in-depth spread.

Mileage. I’ve been steadily building in the past couple months, which is good because I’m about 1.5 weeks’ worth behind on my annual goal of 1,500 miles. I’ve been steadily chipping away at that deficit (it stood at 2.5 weeks’ worth about a month ago), but averaging 31-33 miles per week for the rest of the year could still be a tall order as we head into the holidays. I’m already at 55 miles for the month of October, semi-tapering in preparation for the upcoming AthHalf event in 9 days! After that, it’s a straight shot to our third Chickamauga Battlefield event, at which both The Lady and I will be doing the half this time around.

Maybe next year we’ll both do the full?!

After that, we have a trail half marathon up in Helen, GA in mid-December, so we’ll definitely have to keep our mileage up and even start working in some trails. Given that the weather has finally

FINALLY

FINNNAAALLLLYYYYYYY

started acting more like fall (58F this morning!!), the trails should be quite a bit more pleasant as temperatures continue to fall and the mosquito populations continue to wither until winter’s onslaught.

Speaking of half-marathons…

Sub-1:45? Ish? The Eugene Half was really close to that magical number, all of about 45 seconds long. Given how awful the summer was, and the burning-the-candle-at-both-ends-ness of August and September (and let’s be honest, October too), and how tough the AthHalf course tends to be, I’m not expecting any kind of run at 1:45 in 9 days. I would, however, love to take a crack at my “event” PR of 1:48:56 from 2016 (I say “event” because the course will have changed 3 different times for the same event between 2016, 2017, and 2018). We’ll see how that goes!

That said, provided work eases up just a tad bit more after AthHalf, it’s possible that I could actually make a run at 1:45 for the Chickamauga half. I ran it in under 1:50 the first year while severely undertrained, and came in just under 1:47 last year. I think I’m in better condition this time around than I was even last year, so we’ll see!

And finally, drum-roll…

Work-life balance.

Oy.

The summer was unexpectedly brutal, and since June it’s basically been a sprint with no real let-up. I managed to maintain a decently regular writing regimen through the spring and into the summer, but that basically ended in July. I’ve been more or less white-knuckling it ever since. I’m kind of amazed I’ve managed to keep within range of my 1,500 mile 2018 goal, but as stated even that will be still be tough to hit at this point.

I did spend a lovely half week in San Francisco for a conference back in late August, where I also managed to get a decent amount of running in.

Ran from my hotel to the Golden Gate bridge–a little more than 6 miles one-way. So I basically did a half marathon one morning.

But since then it’s been go-go-go.

• The class I’m teaching this semester is one I taught back in Spring 2017, but due to some personal things at the time there’s a gaping hole in the curriculum right around now, so I’m spending quite a bit of time making lectures and homeworks from scratch.
• Grant proposals have been unending. There was a giant one at the end of July, then another huge one at the end of September (this was one that we submitted last year and missed by inches–others have said they’ve had grants funded on worse reviews than ours). Now I’ve got one next week (Oct 16), and a final one planned for the end of November (the 27th). If literally one of these is actually funded I will be over the moon.
• What’s weird about this brutal mix of teaching-and-grantwriting is that I haven’t been able to read any research papers. At the start of the year I borrowed a page from Carly’s book and started keeping a spreadsheet of the papers I’d read. Granted, I’ve skimmed over abstracts and glanced at figures, but in this spreadsheet I noted papers I’d read start-to-finish, with that intent. The last one that truly met that criteria was from mid-August.
• Sleep has been… problematic. I’m hoping with this Oct 16 grant getting wrapped up, my cortisol levels will chill out a bit.

I fervently hope it won’t be another three months between blog posts. Running has been the thing that, when all else falls off due to work obligations, I let running fall away last, so I’ve still been largely pounding out the miles.

Here we go.

Running doesn’t happen in a vacuum

The Lady and I ran the Peachtree Road Race 10K this week, our fourth since moving to Athens 3.5 years ago (has it been that long already?). Barring some of the most condescending and unhelpful race officials I have ever encountered in my life (they’ll be hearing from me; it was an embarrassment to the sport), it was a top-notch event, as always.

It also continued a monotonic slow-down in race time year-over-year for me since we started running the race as Athens locals: in 2015 I ran it in 46:19; in 2016, 51:48; in 2017, 53:27; and finally, this year, 53:44.

That’s a bit of an oversimplification; after all, the last several blog posts here have detailed how much running has actually improved over the last year-ish. And broadly speaking, that does seem to hold true.

But the month of June was a barn-burner. The two weeks leading up to July 4 were particularly awful.

Mileage the last two weeks of June.

As much as I like and trumpet the fact that running is a mental and physical cleanse, an opportunity to leave the real world behind for a bit and be alone with my thoughts or just the ambience of nature, I can’t make that switch flawlessly; just like I carry the benefits of running with me into my day-to-day life, the consequences of events from my day-to-day trickle into my running. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that I am a function of my entire life, not just the “good” parts I want to bring with on a run.

The Lady and I went through a hard June. We’re still feeling the effects, but we’ve reached the point where re-establishing a regular rhythm–particularly one which involves physical activity–is going to be a net benefit. But to even consider that our running could have continued unaffected during that stretch would be laughable. There was one run (I think it was that Wednesday on the above screenshot, the tiny bubble with no number on it) where I’d planned about 3-5 miles. I got up in the morning, got dressed, headed out… and quit after 1 mile.

There’s the good kind of awful, and just plain shit. This was the latter. You don’t push through that; you listen and do what you need to do, including and especially if that involves not running.

And that’s ok.

Of course, I have a lot of trouble with the “that’s ok” bit. Part of that stems from my innate perfectionism that wants to check off every goal I set: Strava wastes no time in reminding me I’m currently 20 miles behind my mileage goal for the year, which isn’t quite a full week (~28 miles/week is needed to maintain), but warrants attention paid if I want to stay on track. The other part is the fact that, for the most part, I know running is good for me, but too much of anything is a bad thing; finding that balance is tricky. At the time, I wasn’t sure I should call it quits after just 1 mile of a planned 3+; even after I started walking it in, I questioned if I should try to push through it. It’s only in retrospect (two weeks later) that I can confidently say that 1 mile was all I had to give that day, and even then I was probably drawing on the next day’s energy.

Finally, another part of me just wants to run. Rack up those miles, push the pace, snap long-standing PRs, and just fly. Because, all hemming and hawing and navel-gazing aside, I love running.

It’s that simple. But as many religions have found, it’s tough to be both of the world while also separate from it. Impossible, really; that’s why I can’t just flip the switch and drop the real world when it comes time to run.

But it is nice to occasionally remind myself why I run.

2017 in run-morium

Is it already 2018 already? Where did the last year even go?!

…oh.

Yeah, even aside from the obvious, 2017 was brutal on a professional level: submitted close to 20 grant proposals (one funded, still waiting to hear on a couple more, so currently floating at a 5% hit rate… lower if we go by % of requested funds), several papers (though three were just accepted to ISBI!), taught two brand-new courses in the fall and spring, and mentored ~18 students from high school up to doctoral.

And, some. freaking. how. ran my second-highest annual mileage. It felt a bit like the year that both was, and wasn’t.

Ok–let me hit you with some numbers!

• 2017 mileage: 1,423.57 (beat both 2015 and 2016 an average of 400 miles, each; second only to the beast that was 2014’s ~1,600)
• Calories burned: 221,906 (someone convert that to units of “donuts”, please)
• 9 out of 12 months over 100 miles. Three months–April, May, and June–came in under 100 each by a combined total of 29.27mi.

Some other 2017 running highlights (to borrow a page from Carly’s running year-in-review):

• Set a course PR at the Albany Half in March, coming in at 1:48:24. This beat my previous (and first) performance at that half by nearly 5 full minutes.
• Ran November’s Chickamauga Half Marathon in 1:46:55, which was not only a course PR (by about 3 minutes), but was also my fastest half marathon time since I ran about a 1:45-flat at the Georgia Publix half in March of 2015 (aside: it’s been a long, long, looong grind back to fighting form).
• Ran the Chagrin Falls 5K over Thanksgiving break in 22:30, which was likewise my best 5K effort since mid-2015.
• I participated in my first-ever Beer Mile! It’s something I’ve been saying I would do  since a few months before my dissertation defense, so this has been a long time coming. I even did pretty well: 2nd overall, behind last year’s beer mile winner. My running was pretty so-so, but the actual beer-drinking part is where I pretty much wipe the floor. Yes, I do indeed have that ability to “open my throat”, so unless you can make your drink flow faster than standard Earth gravity, it’s unlikely you’d beat me in that part 😉
• I ran over 1,400 miles! Holy $*@#!

Annnnd, in what may be the biggest news of all from 2017: my beautiful, fabulous, enormously-talented wife got me a Garmin Fenix 5 for Christmas!

Yes, that is indeed a Super Mario watchface. Also have ones from Star Trek and Star Wars.

Because it’s a Fenix watch, I named it Phawkes.

*pause for knowing smiles*

2017 wasn’t without some down-beats:

• April and July were just plain rough across the board. April was spent in an exhausted stupor after back-to-back funerals in a three-week span in the previous month, to the point where I had to sacrifice running just to stay afloat. July was brutal for the oppressive heat and humidity, in addition to the never-ending teaching responsibilities and the huge CAREER grant deadline in the middle of the month. Basically, two months of way, way too much going on.
• That metatarsalgia from a few years ago? Yeah, it’s back, but in the other foot this time. As soon as I felt it, I put the custom orthotics back into my everyday shoes, and have also purchased double-wide long run Kayanos. These seem to have mitigated the worst–I’ve had one single long run in the last six months that sidelined me afterwards, unlike every long would the last time–but like last time, it’s just kinda always there. It hasn’t gotten worse since it appeared, which is also a marked improvement, but it probably won’t completely disappear for at least another few months.
• Even though I’ve made strides getting back into fighting form–after moving to Athens, starting a new job, and battling multiple injuries–I lost patience with myself again after the Santa Stroll 8K race in the middle of December. I melted down at about the halfway point, and even though I finished with an 8K that was 6 seconds slower than my best, I still lost it when I crossed the finish line. Most of the time I can logically convince myself that I’m making good progress, that I’m getting stronger all the time, that the day is getting closer when I set a PR again, but on this particular day it broke the surface and I just lost it.

 

Post beer-mile shenanigans.

So here we are, in 2018. Definitely looking to improve my game:

• 1,500 miles. Should be totally doable; push those three consecutive sub-100 months up over 100 and that’s pretty much all there is to it.
• Sub-1:45 half. I’m tentatively targeting the Eugene Half in April for this. We’ve just officially started training (The Lady is training for the full for her next BQ attempt, nat), and with the roaring Fall of 2017 at our backs I should be in pretty good shape to make a run for it in a few months.
• Better work-life balance, primarily through regular writing practice. This is solidly in the camp of “professional resolutions,” but I think this is the one that is by far most likely to reverberate throughout all aspects of my life. I took a writing workshop in December that focused on establishing regular (i.e., daily) writing habits for early career faculty such as myself, and it’s a habit I’m trying now to develop in earnest. Already I can tell I’ve been a little more at ease and patient with myself. It’s a pretty nice feeling to be able to say, after a morning writing session, that I can check that off the rest of the day and worry about other things!

Happy 2018 miles to everyone!

The face of single digits (aka northern Michigan on Christmas Day)!

The Serenity Run

Patience–with both myself and others–has been a key component of my new job. Whereas a graduate student I felt constantly pulled in about 2-3 “major” directions, my tenure-track position feels as though I’m constantly pulled in about 200-300 directions. The result is often that I have to put certain things on hold–sometimes for long periods of time–in order to work on the absolutely time-critical items in front of me.

This year, more than any other, has felt particularly demanding in that regard.

I’ve focused my energies this year on grant proposals. An informal count puts the number of grants to be submitted this calendar year at 20, four in the month of October alone. Naturally this rate of submission has come at the expense of other things, like the actual research–I’ve had to almost exclusively rely on my students for that, and it’s been tough; after all, it was the research that got me this position in the first place.

It’s also come somewhat at the expense of my mental and emotional being, creating an almost-perpetual state of panic about all the writing and idea-having that needs to happen before the next deadline, somehow expertly interleaved with all the teaching. Oh right–did I mention I taught a brand-new course in the spring, and am teaching another brand-new course right now? Both are (if I do say so m’self) awesome courses that I wish I’d been able to take as a student, but there’s no getting around the “brand-new” part and its intense time demands.

But despite the fast-paced balancing act that has been 2017 thus far, I seem to have gravitated toward a take-no-prisoners approach to running. I was so busy over last year’s holiday season preparing for the spring course that I never formulated actual resolutions, but realize now have somewhat informally adopted one: make running happen.

Of course this has other implications: by making running a top priority, I’m also carving out time for sleep (can’t have a run without a recovery). And running tends to be the bulk of my social life, which means I’m still interacting with people (even though I’m an introvert, I have to have social interaction to stay anchored to reality). And most importantly, it means I’m spending time with The Lady, because she’s most likely also running–training for the next BQ race, or just stepping back a little before taking the next plunge.

Without any conscious goal-setting on my part, I’ve consequently set all kinds of mileage milestones:

• Crossed 1,000 miles on the year a few weeks back; 2016 and 2015 were barely over 1,000 total
• Logged 150.34 miles in September; I had to go back to March 2015 for a higher-mileage month, and that was a peak month for Big Sur training
• Broke 100 miles 6 out of 9 months this year; only did that for 5 months in 2016

Of course none of this has been particularly fast; my PRs are still getting dusty (all from 2013 and 2014). I think I’ve run 3 or 4 races total this year, where in years past I’d run 3 or 4 races in a month. But it does nonetheless mean I’ve been taking the time to run.

Gorgeous fall-ish morning runs in Athens.

Long runs in the ‘burgh!

A paradise right alongside the Thames!

And that’s required patience! Patience with my work, knowing that I’d have to put even more things on hold to carve out time to run. Patience with my body, given the deleterious effects of work stress combined with decent running mileage. Patience with circumstances outside my control, particularly the oppressive heat and humidity of the summer months. Patience with myself, knowing I can’t do everything I want to as well as I know I can but still accepting that I did the best I could with what I had.

This is not to say I’ve always been patient with myself, or been able to accept the circumstances in front of me. Quite the opposite; I still struggle with this on a daily basis, and some days are decidedly worse than others. The month of October is particularly heinous given the aforementioned tetra-series of grant deadlines.

But for better or worse, running is an an important part of who I am, a part I’m unwilling to sacrifice no matter how busy life gets. It keeps me sane, even when it’s brutal and challenging and feels awful and I’d rather be blob-ifying on the couch or fast asleep instead of outside at 5am doing tempo miles. It keeps me grounded, chatting with friends on easy runs or even silently enjoying the atmosphere of running in a group of lovely people. It keeps me healthy and strong, sharp for the next challenge in my job or in shape for some random pick-up game. And it keeps me connected with The Lady, since no matter how busy our professional lives may get, we have an almost-daily routine of time we spend together.

Plus, I’m a stress-eater, so the only way to avoid the tenure-track-twenty is to keep running 🙂

Just keep running, just keep running, running, running…

I’m getting stronger. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, but I’m undeniably getting stronger.

A few weeks ago, I recorded a weekly mileage of 38.07. That may not seem all that amazing, but I haven’t hit a 1-week mileage in excess of 38 miles since my Big Sur marathon training in late March 2015, nearly 2 years ago. It’s been a long. damn. time.

Last October, I ran the Ath Half in 1:48:52, a 5.5-minute improvement over the previous year. Just this past week, I ran the Albany Half in 1:48:24, the fastest half marathon I’ve run since the GA Publix Half almost two years ago, also in March 2015. It’s been a long. damn. time.

As has been a regular mantra here of late, I still have a long, long way to go. I’m still barely within sight of my half marathon PR of 1:41–set back in May 2014–and I haven’t done speed work in so long I have to actually sit down to think about what a 7-minute mile would translate to on a per-lap basis.

My mental game is also an utter disaster. I seem to have completely forgotten how to push when I’m entering the pain cave; I mentally cringe and try to hold the pain at bay (which, of course, does nothing except exacerbate it) instead of accepting it and feeding off it. My brain runs at a million miles an hour, just like it does at work, which all but keeps me from settling into a rhythm and letting the miles just tick by.

And holy crap, I can NOT give myself a break. Remember just a few paragraphs ago when I mentioned this year’s Albany Half? By all objective measures, and especially in my specific context, I performed extremely well. Intellectually I understand that, but emotionally I just cannot convince myself I ran a good race, that I’m improving, and that I should be proud of my performance. All that registers on an emotional level is that I’m still 7+ minutes away from taking another crack at my PR, and jfc my mental game is shit.

I know at least some of this is, as always, the fault of the crazy stress levels I’m feeling from work. I’m 300% overextended with no end in sight until at least July; every week is a new version of finding a way to squeeze 100 hours of work into 60, which invariably means dropping the ball on some things, pushing off others, and outright sucking at whatever’s left. Running may be an escape, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s still a function of everything else that’s going on.

One of the few reasons I’ve managed to stick with it is because everything else is also a function of running.

It’s March already, and I still haven’t outlined a concrete set of 2017 resolutions. Or, as of last week, Lenten resolutions.

There are definitely some things I want to do that I know would help across the board. For instance, yoga 5x/week: I did this back in grad school for several months, and the results were absurdly awesome. The problem is when the debate inevitably arises between sleep and yoga, guess which one wins 95% of the time.

I also want to start regularly incorporating core work and weights. For the latter, I’ve already been semi-successfully bringing back “DropAndGiveMe.” But core work has been nonexistent, as allocating time for it has largely run into the same conundrum as yoga.

Speed and tempo work are things I’d like to do regularly, but as long as I’m getting the miles in, these won’t be too difficult to mix in.

Finally, I need to get my diet back on track. Through January and half of February it was pretty good, but I fell off the bandwagon. Stress snacking is one of my less-healthy coping mechanisms, but definitely something I can work on without a huge additional time investment.

As I’ve said, I don’t really know how I’m going to implement some of these. But I suppose it’s a lot like my running. I honestly don’t know how I’m going to get back to making runs at my PRs, but somehow, I’ve kept plugging away when I’ve had no desire to. As a result, every measure says it’s been paying off. Progress has been agonizingly slow, but undeniably measurable. Maybe that’s a good way to approach these resolutions: even when it isn’t pretty, even when it feels like it isn’t working or I would be better served by forgetting about it this time and trying again tomorrow: just keep plugging away.

Just keep running!

Finish chute photo!

Another year over, and what have you done?

Not much, frankly. At least, that’s how it feels.

I haven’t posted nearly as many updates here as I’d wanted to over the course of the year, though I’d say that’s probably because I really didn’t have much of anything to post about until the last few months.

And the past few months have been the most insane months, professionally, of my life. So my running has nonetheless been at a kind of treading-water standstill until I can get things under some modicum of control.

My year-over-year running stats aren’t terribly impressive, though I am glad I crossed the almighty 1000-mile mark. Still, didn’t come close to the monstrous 2014 (I have no idea how I did that; I had a freaking wedding, a dissertation defense, and a relocation that year).

I’m convinced that Garmin changed how their software computes elevation gain from GPS data somewhere in 2012-2013 and again 2014-2015, because seriously, wtf.

This year has been frustrating. I was really hoping it’d be a comeback year for me after last year’s extremely lackluster and injury-prone antics, but that was derailed early on by an injury that just wouldn’t go away, and then further put on hold by a professional life that rode burnout for a couple months. The month-by-month breakdown throws this into sharp relief:

Take a look at the last few months of 2015, and the first few months of 2016, in comparison to the rest of 2016 (from May onwards): they’re night and freakin’ day.

(This month has been a little weird with travel, sickness, and general burnout recovery, but I’m hoping I can ramp things up in the next 10 days and still hit 100 miles)

October’s Ath Half was a wake-up call that my body has been responding to the training without my consciously realizing it–that I’m slowly getting stronger even if I don’t really feel that way. So now, I want to see if I can start to capitalize on that.

Obviously that would take the form of more frequent structured workouts (I currently do…ZERO!) in the form of speed work at the track and tempo runs. Additionally, I’d like to maintain the current level of weight-training (sessions with Matt are pretty awesome) and hopefully throw in some more cross-training (yoga, erg, cycling).

Of course, this is all going to depend on what my spring shapes up to be. Right now, I’m slated to teach yet another brand-new course, so at least initially that’s going to take up all my time and energy. But since it’s only one course, as opposed to the two from this past fall, I’m crossing my fingers that it won’t be such a time sink.

The Lady will be going for her next BQ attempt–Glass City in April–and I’m toying with the idea of hiring her coach to be mine as well. I really want to get back on the horse, and I think adding some structure and accountability to someone other than myself will be the best way to do it. I’m just not sure what form that should take:

• Should I go for the sub-1:40 half marathon? I’ve been in that hunt for almost 5 years, and achieving that would feel really freaking good.
• Should I go for the sub-4 hour marathon? I’m still convinced my current 4:17 is a soft PR, and with the right training it could tumble.

The half obviously is more conducive to someone with a tight work schedule, but in some ways I feel like the full would be less stressful and a good way to get my mental game back on track as well as my physical game.

Feel free to leave any feedback on this 🙂

Happy holidays!