Moving On Up

A few hours after the Ed Murphey Mile in Memphis, Tennessee I shifted balance on the wall I was perched on outside a bar filled to capacity. My track season had just ended. As I craned my neck to see inside through big glass windows, huge versions of Floyd Mayweather and Connor McGregor danced, projected onto the bar wall during round eight of their much anticipated fight. Out there in the Memphis night there was barely room to get an unobstructed view of a TV inside.

Earlier in the evening, eight of us took up our own stage on a high school track on the outskirts of Memphis.  Standing on the makeshift mile start line, thousands of fans clamored at our periphery in the outside lanes and the infield. We felt something like Mayweather and McGregor must have felt in the ring. All athletes do. Knowing that was pain was about to come. Feeling the proximity of human bodies, leaning in, anticipation palpable in eyes.

Just eight men and seven women comprised the mile/1500m fields in Memphis, including pacers. Crowded, physical races are part of running, but this very small field was refreshing after a spring and summer of jockeying for position in US, Irish, and Belgian track races. Minutes before our race, the women put on a great 1500 meter show, and the crowd was still buzzing. The entire track was lined with people. 

Their roar abruptly crescendoed at the start as if torn from the starter's gun, its wave rippling around the oval, preceding and following us as we covered four laps for the mile. I never remember much detail from a race, but I do recall hearing "USA! USA! USA!" on each run of the backstretch. The pace was good and fast early as we passed 800m in one minute and fifty six seconds. 

Pacer Jesse Garn (a great guy) takes us through three laps in the inaugural Ed Murphey Mile in Memphis, TN.

You never truly settle in a mile. It's too short a race, and even the smallest gap to the guy or girl ahead can lose you the race. You enter into a state of strained relaxation at the intersection of conscious thought and subconscious action. The world collapses down into a few blurry objects seen through a pinhole, the wind in your ears, and the notion of how much you have left in your legs versus how far it is to the finish.

With six hundred meters to go I was in second place behind Craig Engels, one of those young guns right out of college. He had just cut his magic mullet off a few weeks earlier, so I thought maybe my old man strength could prevail over him. We were cutting the fastest pace I'd personally been on for a mile or 1500 in the past several seasons, so the letters P and R started floating around in my head on the second bend of the third lap.

But seconds later, coming around into the bell lap, Craig, in the lead, slowed down considerably. It was then that I made the mistake of not maintaining our roll and going around him. Instead, Eric Avila shot out of third past us into the lead. By then there were 400 meters left, I was in third place, and the kick was on.

It is here that we come to the point of, or at least part of the thrust behind, this blog you are reading.

Sticking to a strategy that isn't paying off, but still has a chance to, can be scary. In most endeavors, (except for like, trying to hit a piñata blindfolded)  you'll never find success unless you pursue a given strategy for a long, long, (long) time, wringing it of its potential. We have a word for that: committing. Running is one of those endeavors (you should still commit to the piñata because there's candy in it.)

After finding success in them, I've been committed to running shorter distance races (1500m, mile, 5,000m) since college, and I've been consistent. But pretty much just that: consistent. Running up to and just barely kissing personal bests each year, racking up many 5k performances in the thirteen-thirties and miles with one or two seconds of four minutes. Good performances, but not ones in line with my desire to continue improving.

So imagine my mingled dismay and disbelief when, after that last lap in Memphis, after cushioning ourselves by a full four seconds below four minute mile and P.R. pace through halfway, and seeing the door open to the lead heading into the bell, I finished fourth and the clock read 4:00.3 next to my name in the end. We’d slowed down too much on the third lap and it cost us. Btw, I had ran 4:00.7 three weeks earlier in Raleigh. I told you I was consistent.

(I'm not asking for your phalanges to ply the world's smallest fiddle for me here. Everyone's running career is a big series of experiments, and results are results, especially when they're less than "stellar". [Let me also say that disappointment very quickly gave way to joy at being part of such a great event in Memphis. The top three got under four, so it was a historic race. Having barely finished, I turned around and jogged down the line of spectators for a round of high fives.  My legs experienced a second round of numbing lactic buildup even at ten minute pace {how the hell do people do victory laps or post-race dances <Ezekiel Kemboi> looking so good?!}, but my spirit was quickly repaired. That's the beauty of events that get the fans close, physically, to the athletes. Like Memphis, Sir Walter Miler in Raleigh, the Long Island Mile, and others have been popping up. Like boxing. {In fact I started writing so much on the topic of making running more popular through format and presentation that I had to fork it over to a  separate, forthcoming blog. Stay tuned.}])

Getting fans close to athletes is the future of this sport. Sir Walter Miler in Raleigh, NC.

Memphis ended as somewhat of a paraphrase of my entire season: healthy, running pretty fast, but performing time and time again on the same plane. Our strength coach at Texas once told us that the definition of insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That’s not really what it says in the dictionary, but I’ve been feeling a bit insane in that sense lately. 

So it’s finally time to try a new strategy. I’m selling my car and moving to Saskatchewan!

Just kidding. I’m not going anywhere. Luckily running offers more than one surface to gallop upon, and plenty of distances to gallop over.  It's time for me to move up in distance. 

No, not to the marathon. Yet. I’m not ready to relinquish all my fast twitch muscle fibers. Just half of them. I’ll be running the Houston Half Marathon in January. Race weekend in Houston will likely have a healing and inspiring effect on the city after Hurricane Harvey, and I’m excited to run and be part of the race. The remainder of 2018 will include more racing on the roads than on the track, although I’ll run a track 10,000m or two in the spring, and will probably hate myself afterwards.

Training will change, too. I’ve never trained like a true miler, but in parallel with the shorter distances I’ve targeted in the past few years, things like volume (mileage over time) and intensity of workouts have always been closer to a shorter, faster, trackier motif while at Princeton, Texas, and Zap Fitness. That’s going to change.

Basically my running pedigree boils down to a battle between my mom and dad’s sides of the family. Dad, with his shorter, stockier stature lends speed and power (and my big butt) to the equation. But then mom comes in and lets me run really far, with her thin, tall dad and willowy ancestors. I’ve been giving them both a chance up until now by focusing on the classic speed/distance combo that is the 5,000m event.  So sorry, dad. Time to give mom and the longer, strength oriented side some more love with things like triple digit mile weeks, longer threshold workouts and tempo runs, and farther long runs.

Squad. Andrew, Aaron, Brandon, and I line up for the Morton Games 5,000m in Dublin this summer.

Absolutely the most important thing for a runner (or anyone, with any passion) is to be excited about running and to keep having fun doing it. When you’ve reached a stale point or a bit of a plateau/mesa type thing, it’s time to make a change. Running in a few new events and getting a novel race calendar is exciting. Even more so is the renewed prospect of finding my true strength and reigniting my belief that I can make a world championship or olympic team. With new goals and a plan to reach them, it feels as if I’ve retired from one job and taken up a new one, where the water cooler is twice as far away, I work late on weekends, and have a brand new stapler.

I took a two week active break after the Memphis Ed Murphey Mile, and am now in the second week of building up mileage. My first race back actually makes this whole blog look like a lie, since it’s a 5k - the USATF Championship / Dash to the Finish Line race in New York City. Last time I ran that race, in 2013, I first met and shared a hotel room with the late runner David Torrence, who tragically died last month at way too young an age. It being one of my first races on the pro circuit, DT made an impression on me. He was eager to hand down seasoned wisdom on training and traveling and racing to a young pro just getting started (though he kept the room way too cold). I was always very impressed with his racing savvy and ability to run everything from the 800m to the 5,000m and beyond at a super high level, and his ability to pump up crowds and make people love him. He will be missed.

After New York it’s a few more road races in November and the Club Cross Country Championships in December. The fall/winter cycle builds to the Houston half marathon in January, after which we’ll start looking at that 25 lap track race and road races around the country.

For those of you who’ve somehow managed to read all the way to here, I reward you with an update on the Zap Fitness vegetable garden. This year has seen by far our most abundant harvest. The tomatoes did decently, though many get caterpillarized if you don’t pick them soon enough. Our real windfall was in jalapeños. They are the spiciest, tastiest ‘peños I’ve ever indulged in. Going in and coming out. And we have more basil than we know what to do with. Make a lot of pesto I guess.

That's it for now. Thanks for reading.

Upcoming race schedule:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
November 4	US 5k Road Champs/Abbott Dash to the Finish	New York, NY	Road 5k
November 11	VCU Health 8k	Richmond, VA	Road 8K
November 23	Manchester Road Race	Manchester, CT	Road 4.748 miles
December 9	Club Cross Country Championships	Lexington, KY	Cross country 10k
January 14	Aramco Houston Half Marathon	Houston, TX	Half Marathon

Mud

“And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around.

Lucky me, lucky mud.

The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t get to sit up and look around.

I got so much, and most mud got so little.

Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep.

What memories for mud to have!

What interesting kinds of other sitting-up mud I met!”

- Excerpt from the last rites of the Bokonist Faith, Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut

Here are some of the kinds of things I think about during a run:

[This is a run amongst trees and on dirt, pine needles, and rocks tumbled from the oldest mountains in the world, the Appalachians, which are beginning to look soft and rounded now, after all this time.]

I can't help but think, me being a piece of mud that got to sit up and look around, that running is just Earth playing catch with itself. With a piece of itself. A piece of Earth’s own mud. Every stride, lasting around one third of a second, a parabolic hop, an orbit, albeit short, about the planet. This leads to some questions.

What happens to Earth when I push off of it? Does Earth move below me? Wouldn't you feel more important if every time you leapt off the ground you moved an entire planet? Why haven’t all the runners pushed Earth out of its orbit with all their pushing and shoving and hopping over the years?

How much of the mud has been a human at one time or another?

As it happens, you do move Earth when you jump off it. It moves away from you in the opposite direction. Earth has a mass of 5.972 trillion trillion kilograms, and a 150 pound runner, for example, whose stride bounces her center of mass up and down three inches every step, would move Earth 341 billionths of a trillionth of an inch. A pretty small amount, but you can be proud that you made a difference.

Don't forget that you exert your own gravitational pull on Earth.

While you're floating through the air, dreaming of brunch or whatever, Earth is attracted to you [All matter in the Universe is attracted to you for that matter]. When you push off, Earth begins moving away, but immediately its speed begins lessening. At the height of your parabolic, beautiful gliding stride, the Earth also reaches its [much, much smaller] furthest distance of shoved-ness, and as you start falling back to terra form, Earth begins moving back to you. You crash into each other, exactly canceling each other's motion.

So no matter how much running you do with no matter how many friends, once you stop, everything is as it was. Like life. Like mud that got to sit up. But that’s ok. Enjoy your orbit.

You can calculate what percentage of Earth has been part of a human being at one time or another, given the 107 billion humans who have ever lived, their average weight, their average lifespan, and the myth that your body’s cells get replaced every seven years. It’s like 5.56 trillionths of the planet’s mass. Not much mud, relatively, has been lucky enough to sit up and look around. But some has.

All that is to say:

On one hand, it’s tempting to write off your impact on the world as minuscule. "All we are is dust", "Alas poor Yorick", etc.

On the other hand, you could view your life's effect as a force that, no matter how minuscule, still moves a massive world. A massive universe. Which sounds cooler.

Walk across the room. In 105 years, some particle of dust floating in space 105 light years away will feel your movement, you gravitational influence having traveled at the speed of light through space to it. That should make you feel Relatively Special.

Who are we, then, to claim that our effect on the world and on one another isn't large, doesn't matter? We move planets when we go running.

Pardon, Andrew and I moving some mud around in hopes of turning mud into food
for mud that got to sit up and look around.

But sometimes I get caught up in trying to attribute too much matter and meaning to what I do.

If someone asked me at the post office, “who’s your biggest enemy?” my third answer would be “myself”, after burnt toast and car commercials that ruin perfectly good classic rock songs. It’s easy to get in your own way trying to attain something you want perhaps too badly.

Let me bring this back to the genre of this blog.*

Running’s challenge for me boils down to a fight against my serious side. It helps me work hard, but often keeps me from relaxing. Relaxing is the main ingredient in running well.

In the fall, when I was hurt, I had a “Why do I run?” existential crisis. I kept trying to attach a meaning to running (besides the millions I make, of course). I was inspiring others. I was bettering myself for the future, when an improved work ethic would pay dividends. Whichever way I spun it, the answer still had a tint of selfishness in it.

As Pete gradually nursed me back to my current state of health and fitness, I made a pact with myself. I would enjoy running for running, without a higher motive. This basically required thinking less and having more fun. It meant paring my sight into the future down to the level of a couple days, rather than dwelling on what I wanted to happen two months down the road.

And I came to the conclusion:

There is a meaning. There’s always a meaning. You don’t need to know what it is though. Just trusting that there’s a meaning is enough. That’s why I think about shoving the entire planet around by infinitesimal amounts while I run on it. You don't have to be as weird as me to prove this to yourself.

Still, that serious side of mine got me in trouble a few times this track season. I came into a few races a little jumpy and rigid, and found myself in places I didn’t particularly want to be. I wanted to run fast so badly that I got in the way of myself.

In the Payton Jordan 5,000m early in May, the whole field was looking at each other as we fanned eight wide in the first half lap, no one wanting to set the pace. I had “too good” of a start and found myself leading the race from the gun on an unusually breezy Palo Alto night, at a disadvantage compared to those tucked in behind me. I couldn’t get relaxed and in rhythm and it cost me. The field beat me over the final lap to a 13:57 5k.

At the Adrian Martinez Classic 3,000m earlier this month, I found myself in a similar position, leading, when the pacer dropped out after a mile. Someone’s gotta be the sacrificial lamb, leading the race far from the finish, but I’d prefer not to be. The extra fraction of a percent of mental effort spent keeping the pace moving took away from my finish once again.

Adrian Martinez 3,000m in Concord, MA

But I kept thinking short term and ran better at the Oxy High Performance meet in L.A. (13:39) and last weekend at Portland Track Fest (13:34), increasingly relaxing mentally and physically.

Hands, face loose, mind blank, run tall, chin up, don’t muscle out the last lap. Don’t think so much. Run to run.

Meaning is revealed in hindsight, when you see where your gravitational waves spread to.

This coming week is the USATF Championships in Sacramento, California. Zap Fitness has seven athletes running (Joanna, Aaron, Johnny, Andrew in the 10,000m, Brandon in the 3,000m steeplechase, and myself in the 5,000m). It’s going to be hot out even at night, so anything can happen in the distance events [I mean, someone could slip on a banana peel!]. The top three athletes in each event qualify to represent team USA at the World Championships in London in August†.

Workout on Bass Lake in Blowing Rock, NC with the Zap Fitness men's team.

Zap is a really healthy place to be training and living these days. I've always loved our training base in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but this year there's a special energy around the team that's really made it fun to work hard. Adult running camp season has started up and that adds a ton of energy to the elite team too. Our campers come from all over the country and world, and every one of them has had an inspiring journey in running and life to tell. We learn just as much from them as they do from us.

Last thought: If running is the Earth playing catch with itself, is interplanetary spaceflight just the planets playing catch with one another?

Thanks for reading. Here's a list of upcoming races:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue  Distance
June 23	US Track Championships	Sacramento, CA	Track 5,000m
July 7	Letterkenny Intl. Track Meet	Letterkenny, Ireland	Track mile
July 12	Morton Games	Dublin, Ireland	Track 5,000m
July 18	Cork City Sports	Cork, Ireland	Track 3,000m
July 22	KBC Nacht	Heusden Zolder, Belgium	Track 5,000m
August 4	Sir Walter Miler	Raleigh, NC	Track mile

*nominally running but primarily misquoted literature, self deprecation

†provided they obtain their event’s world ‘A’ standard by July 21st

Calcallous

"You have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves and everything will fall into place."     - Paul "Mustang" Chelimo's Instagram account


Without a wristwatch, there are two ways of knowing intuitively how fast you’re going.  One way, combining a running pace’s affect on your body with past training experience, triangulates your speed feel-ologically.  Or you can gauge pace based on how fast things around you seem to be scrolling backwards into your periphery before they disappear in your wake.  

The latter is much less accurate, especially at night, when running always seems faster (and therefore more fun), or in the middle of a desert or something, when there isn’t much optical (or digestible, for that matter) fodder for your visual speedometer.  By the way, four minute mile pace (15 m.p.h.) looks disappointingly slow viewed from the cockpit of any semi sportsy car.  Forgo the eyes.  (Most) Well-trained athletes can easily and accurately run within five seconds per mile of a target pace, completely on feel.

Finishing the Gate River Run / US 15k Championship

I didn’t need my body to tell me I was running slowly up “Green Monster”, the sisyphusian bridge spanning the Saint James River in the final two miles of the Gate River 15k Run in Jacksonville, Florida.  The structure’s weathered green I-beams oozed viscously from Dali’s paintbrush into and out of my tunnel vision as we raced upward, hundreds of feet above the river.  The brackish waters below were replete with dolphins I would have given anything, (please, anything!) to be playing with instead of this.  The long curve of the bridge deck rolled over painfully, deliciously slowly, its false summit a tangential mirage that kept dancing away from the couple of others I was running with as we surged and yo-yo-ed to the top.

You needn’t be a mathematician to understand the calculus of that bridge’s curve.  In your legs you felt its concave belly inflect mercifully into its convex shoulder, a curvaceous spine transmitting hurt to its foolish pilgrims of pain.  Your best bet, a trick of the mind, was to celebrate inwardly when you reached the point of maximum incline, grateful for its rolling over, though there remained eons until you actually summited.  When you did, you had exactly one mile to go, all down hill.  

By the way, I was not running in the lead pack by the time Green Monster reared its head in the eighth mile of the race.  That maglev train of frictionless speed rolled through this elevated station minutes ago, roadside trash rollicking and concrete span joints groaning in the shockwave left by their hasty departure.  Race winner Leonard Korir ended up running the final, all-downhill mile in ‘only’ 4:08, finishing when I had about 900 meters (nine football fields + on your own 16 yard line) left to go.  

I extracted revenge on Korir when Gate’s athlete coordinator / benefactor in selfless deeds of U.S. distance running Richard Clark Fannin Jr. came up to me, ray banned, at the after-race pool-pizza-beer party (what other race has a scheduled, mandatory post-run pool party, not to mention after party w/ fried gator + after-after party?) and said “Joe, you’re a big guy, [thanks.] help me throw Lenny in the pool!”  After which, terrified, I chucked one of America’s greatest runners / Olympian, who can’t swim, into a four and a half foot deep pool, praying his legs cleared the ledge.

<——All that is to say, I survived (I type therefore I am) the first race back in a while, survived it and enjoyed it, even if it was a donkey-whipping.  On to the next one.

… In which, on North Carolina State’s track in Raleigh last weekend, I tithed Gate River’s 15,000 meter pain payment, stepping down to a mercifully bridgeless 1,500 meter race.  I was again beaten soundly, running 3:46 and experiencing what the industry calls booty lock: when your hamstrings and butt turn into rigor mortified slabs of round steak. 

Start of 1500m at Raleigh Relays

One of Pete’s Peteisms is that progress in distance running isn’t linear.  He’s right.  If you’re lucky, progress progresses sinusoidally, rising and falling across pretty snow capped peaks and lush river valleys in the off seasons.  More likely though, progress approximates some crazy thirteenth degree polynomial with random, remorseless asymptotic plunges to what seems like negative infinity, at the time.  Runners (like gamblers) live for those somewhat rare, glorious ascents to new maximums despite the powerful and totally obvious odds stacked against them.  And we love it. 

Given the comeback from injury in the fall, I have to be satisfied with getting to these start lines healthily and move on from losses quickly.  After a certain number of beatings, the legs figure out how to race again.  Neither of these first couple races were anything special by themselves, but they were good enough to serve as platforms for a great season.  Runners and humans should know that success can follow any sequential jumble of highs, lows, and failure.  You never  truly know when the next home run is: it could even come after your cat just died, you're sick, and your basement just flooded.  Or something.  

Just keep going and eventually it'll stick.  That's it.  Finding Nemo said it better than I did.

Upcoming Races:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
April 15	B.A.A. 5k	Boston, MA	Road 5k
April 21	Larry Ellis Invite	Princeton, NJ	Track 1500
May 4	Payton Jordan Invitational	Palo Alto, CA	Track 5000
June 22-25	USATF Championships	Sacramento, CA	TBA

Fenestration

Afraid to swing my legs off the bed and put my feet on the floor, I stared at the blankness of my bedroom walls.  When I was younger, this would have been because I was afraid some raptor clawed monster with long, snatching arms waited beneath the bed, ready to drag me to its lair in the basement.  Or if at home in Milwaukee during the winter, because the hardwood floor of my bedroom tended to match the outside's midwest temperatures, ready to freeze bare feet.  Now I stared at the paintings on my bedroom walls.  Checked my heart rate.  The morning light made reflections in the altitude tent plastic, little faces that distorted and chuckled in the breeze coming from the window.

I was delaying the beginning of the day because I felt a sharp ache in my upper outside ankle.  I didn't want to put weight on it and confirm my worst fears: another bone injury.  I was being dramatic.  A year ago Id’ve chalked this kind of pain up to just another demon sorely haunting my flesh, tendons, and bones.  One of the countless reliably exorcised during the first cracking, tendon popping shuffle to the bathroom, or if stubborn, during the first few running steps of the day. 

As it turns out, I got up, went to practice, ran, and have kept on running since.  The ankle thingy was just that: a thing.  But my hesitancy shows one thing: getting hurt last September has certainly made me keenly aware of my vincibility.  I think that’s a word.

Having neglected to write for so long I feel obliged to rewind (still a word I think) to September twentieth.  I had just posted a blog piece that mentioned how taking a longer break from running had left me refreshed and healthy.  I was about to be proven (mostly) wrong.  The very next morning, on a hard hill workout with (ya done messed up) Aaron at Bass Lake, hubris struck swiftly and sans mercy.  Somewhere in my pelvis, some of the strongest ligaments in the body pulled hard enough on my sacrum, a bone between the pelvic wings, to fracture it.  I knew immediately during the workout that something was wrong.  Donald Trump was way too close in the polls.  And my back really hurt.  Luckily I only ran about an extra mile on the injury, hoping it was just freak pain, before I stopped.

Several days later, an MRI confirmed what we were already almost certain of: a sacral stress fracture.  Pete’s recovery protocol called for a full eight weeks totally away from running. Unlike other types of fractures, virtually every cross training modality, including biking, elliptical, swimming, pool running, walking, and even helping to construct a scale replica of the Great Pyramids of Giza by hand end up irritating a sacrum fracture.  Exercise was out.  I was now wanted by the Sacral Police around the Zap Fitness campus.  Five-stars-on-GTA wanted.  If I was caught so much as dancing I’d receive a stern reprimand from team mates. Eight weeks of electrifying ossification it was.

Wanted by the sacral police in Boston

As it turns out, running problems aren’t much different from living in Egypt under Pharaoh and the Ten Plagues.  Pee transforming into blood.  Lyme disease.  Shards of glass impaling the foot.  Food poisoning from diseased livestock.  Disintegrating bones.  I’ve seen friends and team mates with it all over the years.

Stress fractures are about as common as Starbucks locations will be on the moon in 2050. Most athletes on the professional circuit have suffered at least one bone fracture or reaction in their career.  Many ridiculously accomplished athletes seem to exist in a perpetual state of duct taped-ness, cross training from one window slit of health to the next, yet still pulling off amazing performances in times of relative health despite their apparent fragility.  

Having been healthy for so long, part of me felt I had it coming; that every lucky streak comes to an end.  This notion made being hurt a little easier to swallow.  I was finally about to experience the other side of competitive runner life coin for the first time: video games.  I mean…  being debilitatingly injured.  Actually I just watched team mates play video games. I’m more of an observer.  Seriously though: a runner should always do everything in her or his power to avoid getting hurt, but when she does, he should remember that being hurt is part of the process.  Injury is a cost of doing business.

And I’m finally a member of the Bones Brigade.  I know their secrets.

Rule number one: You don’t talk about the… 

You believe you’re going to come back stronger than before.  Not in an abstract, cliche way, either.  You believe you’re going to have your best season ever, right after being in the worst shape of your life, or at least since your middle school skateboarding years.  As in, you’re going to win stuff you’ve never won before and run personal bests you’ve never run before. Which is the definition of a personal best.  This helps get you through the days when the altitude tent faces start to look like that clown from It, or worse, James Franco.

I didn’t delight in not engaging in the activity I enjoy the most for two months.  I had too much time to think.  I started writing a novel about a coach that mentors athletes for years, only to sadistically murder them and stuff their corpses in a collapsed mineshaft.  I envisioned a toaster that prints the weather forecast, motivational phrases, and market futures on your toast.  (already been done)  I did quite a bit of sifting through thoughts, most of which fall under the “holy shit I’m getting old where did the time go and what am I doing with my life” theme.

I’m proud to report I came out on the other side.  No.  I didn’t quite experience the sunlit burst of mach-nine-jet-fighter-flying-out-of-a-masisve-kerosene-explosion type inspiration that some people claim they get after overcoming injury.  I know success won’t be automatic. It’ll have to be worked for over time.  It’s a long trail back to peak lifetime fitness.  That’s the realist in me.  What I am feeling, now healthy, with three workouts under my belt and running mid-seventies miles per week, on the way up, is a sense of reset and swift progress away from the bottom.  

I returned to running Thanksgiving week with a blissful nine minute jaunt on the alter-gravity treadmill at 70 percent body weight.  We did several weeks worth of short alter-G runs alternating with swim days.  By mid December most runs were on land with all 9.81 meters per second squared of sweet gravity pulling my aching limbs that forgot how to run down towards the center of the Earth.

The first hard workout back was here in Tallahassee.  Brandon and Matt dragged my mouth breathing self around four times two kilometer repetitions on grass soccer fields.  The 800 meter loop that Pete measured and marked out would have made lovers of quicksand and many sided polygons proud.  I didn’t care how much energy the angel food cake-like ground soaked up from our strides.  I was just glad to be back rolling after so much lying around doing crosswords.

Matt, Brandon, and I running a hill cycle workout in Tallahassee earlier this month.

Admittedly, there were moments during time off and the early phase of starting again when I was mildly depressed.  Doubtful that I’d be able to climb back to competitive fitness.  I didn’t feel like a runner, which, despite trying to stay diversified in my interests, is a huge part of my identity.  While not running in September, October, and November, the next most exciting aspects of life began creeping into my thoughts.  What am I going to do after professional running?  I want to engineer and invent.  My dream is to be an entrepreneur. With nothing else to do, I began doing research, sketching ideas, calling people.  Which is great, except for one thing: I’m not done committing myself fully to running yet.  Post-running life was making a house call while running was away.  The desire to do something frankly stressed me out, because I was, and still am, around Zap, a running environment (except for the occasional drag race and pistol duel).  

In the end I learned from this injury something I already knew, but had to be reminded of: to just relax and live the life I’m living currently.  That’s easier to write now, when I’m grabbing fitness left, right, port, and starboard and beginning to see the light.  When you’re going through a tough time, believe that your wayward anchor, when it’s given back to you, will serve its purpose and make you happy again.  I forgot for a time how great working towards hefty goals, finishing a hard workout, and sharing a swift run with friends makes me feel.  Natural.  Purposeful. 

Maybe I just came to the exact same conclusion that many before me already have.  But everyone has to wade through the same experiences, bound by shallows and miseries at times.  Would life be any fun if you were born with the wisdom of humanity come before you?  Probably not.  I always preferred the Do It Yourself (w/ your contemporaries) section.

One day I was staring out of my window at a tree high up on the ridge opposite our house.  It towered above all the rest against the sky.  The wind had gradually bent its limbs until they permanently embraced the trunk’s leeward side.  I was trying to determine from my window whether the tree was an evergreen or a deciduous tree, but at that distance I couldn’t be sure.  I resolved to take a steep hike up to find out.  But then I got hurt and couldn’t walk.

Six weeks later in November when the valley was awash in fiery yellows and reds, I looked out the window and my tree stood out, clearly ever green, high on the ridge.  Sometimes you just have to wait.

Team field trip to St. Mark's Wildlife Refuge and alligator alley.  Matt was so scared he kept his eyes closed the whole time.

Zap Fitness is in hard training at Tallahassee training camp until mid February.  Then we’ll retreat back into the mountains and enjoy Chef Michael (co-author of a forthcoming Zap Fitness cookbook + workout book!) food once again.

Having started training so late following the injury, my agenda for 2017 is a long track and road racing season extending all the way into October.  The first time I put the uniform on will be to pace 5,000m and mile heats at the Iowa State Classic indoor meet in a few weeks. My first real race will be the Gate River Run / US 15k Championship in March.  That one will be successful if I avoid a post-race thermometer up the butt like two years ago.  TMI?

Thanks for reading all the way to the end, gentle reader.  To reward you, I leave you with this: flamingoes are pink because they eat shrimp.

Here's my tentative race schedule:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
February 11	Iowa State Classic	Ames, IA	Indoor track pacing duties
March 11	Gate River Run	Jacksonville, FL	Road 15k
March 24	Raleigh Relays	Raleigh, NC	Track 1500, 5000 pace
April 15	Boston Athletic Assoc. 5k	Boston, MA	Road 5k
May 3	Payton Jordan Invite	Palo Alto, CA	Track 5k