New York, I'm Coming Atcha from Appalachia

(Yes, the title rhymes. In Appalachia we say Appel - latch - uh.)

It's not goodbye, just see you later

I'll get the announcement out of the way early: I'm moving to New York City with Joanna!

Fittingly, I'm starting a new life chapter in the same city where the special moment I consider to have opened this past life chapter took place:

In the Fall of 2011, anemia nearly cut the legs out from under my senior cross country season at Princeton. But a ferritin test late in the game prompted me to start taking iron supplements, something I'd never done. Within two weeks, workouts began indicating that something positive was happening with my fitness: I wasn't struggling to hit fast paces anymore. Unfortunately it was too late. I wasn't named to travel with the team to the NCAA championships in Terre Haute; I simply hadn't proven to the coaches I was ready in time. But there was a consolation: the IC4A cross country championships held the same week in Van Cordtland Park, the Bronx. Many northeastern teams that didn't make the national meet as well as the "B" squads from schools that do make NCAA's compete at IC4A's.

Do you know what it feels like to finally have your hard work pay off at the eleventh hour, when it was beginning to look totally futile? I'd spent the summer of 2011 running month's worth of 100+ mile weeks at altitude in Park City, UT, chasing my team mates on tempo and long runs, lungs burning for what I only now know was anemia. I was over trained, and when the season began the results showed it. 25:53 and 26:01 8k performances, about two minutes slower than what I'd run a year earlier. I wasn't even close to making the 12-man Heptagonal (Ivy League) conference team, a hard pill to swallow for a senior.

But the summer training in Utah didn't go away. My blood iron levels on the rise, I was less handicapped. We showed up to IC4A's in New York, and I led Princeton's junior varsity squad to an individual and team win. I ran 24:49 for 8k, not bad on the hills of VCP, with fellow Tigers in a tight group not far behind. Celebrating our win with my team mates after, I felt that a switch had just flipped. I had turned a corner. 

On that day I started becoming the runner who would break four minutes in the mile, set school records at Princeton and Texas, and go on to run professionally. On that day, running grabbed hold of me tightly, and it led me all the way through my twenties to now.

Since then, I've spent the better part of decade in pursuit of a simple but evasive quarry: running faster. Living and breathing running at ZAP, sacrificing a "normal" life in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. Two things from this place are going to leave an everlasting impression on me: the physical landscape and the people.

The view was different every day I lived here

Here it is rhododendron forest, ancient gray rock heaving at crazy angles out of ridge tops, and mountains that fold and fold to the horizon. If you're running, you're inevitably next to a creek or river, and the steeper the road or trail you're on, the smaller and younger the water. The topography funnels us around here, controls where we go, and sculpts us physically and mentally. I've been profoundly inspired by these ancient mountains.

The people: the team mates and coaches at ZAP who each left their own unique impression on me. A group of runners is a like a cast of cartoon characters: each with strengths and weaknesses that are amplified and caricatured by the demands of our sport. I could write a book about each one of them. Few work-life situations could have developed in me the type of empathy, patience, and love for others that ZAP has.

The people.

Having lived in the North Carolina mountains for seven years, Manhattan is going to be quite a lifestyle change. But none of my running goals are modified. I'll still be affiliated with ZAP and On Running, training for next year's Olympic track trials in Eugene, and looking forward to a career in the marathon. In moving to the city and working a job in engineering (hire me!), I'm taking a leap that will force me to radically alter what daily training looks like, and more importantly, provide distraction from running. Which, believe it or not, is a good thing.

I never could quite sit still at ZAP. Pro running is about spending a few hours working really hard, and then chilling for the other 21 hours of the day. The best athletes can turn their brains off and let stress-free recovery take place. I always wanted to be producing: building something, starting a company, climbing a mountain. I alternately fought against and accepted relaxation throughout my entire seven year career at ZAP. I'd tend to categorize activities as either worth my time or a waste of my time, which can become unhealthy. Sometimes your best memories with friends or your clearest ideas come when your time isn't structured.

In New York, I hope to appreciate my free moments more. To make running a release.

I've given full-time running a really good shot. I competed with success at everything from the 1500 to the marathon, lived and trained with 21 other team mates and friends over the years at ZAP, and competed all over the country and world. It was a hell of a good time. 

But the thing is, the hard work has not yet paid off.

Here's to knocking it loose at the moment it's really beginning to look futile.

Really going to miss this place.

- - - - - - - - - - - - -

Little update on training & racing amidst the pandemic: We somehow managed to sneak two real races in this summer - the WISCO Mile in Milwaukee, where I ran 4:06, and the Music City Distance Carnival in Nashville last weekend, where I ran 13:45 for 5k. Both did a good job with COVID precautions, especially MCDC, which required two negative tests the week of the meet. There is a possibility of competing in a 10,000m next weekend in LA, depending on city health department permissions. 

Joanna and I are carrying out our mandatory 14 day quarantine in NYC, having traveled from North Carolina. We bought a cheap treadmill to train on while we're holed up in the apartment, so that's going to be a lot of fun. In all seriousness, I believe it's possible to maintain a high level of training AND good levels of virus precaution. You just have to be willing to do a little extra work and be a little uncomfortable at times. That goes for whatever your passion is: find a way to adapt.

Thanks for reading.

MCDC 5,000m in Nashville 8/15/2020

Disjointed

Everyone knows this: conquering one's own mind is the underlying challenge of running and sports in general. A lot of people fixate on the immediate, day to day challenge of running: getting out the door in hot, cold, or wet conditions for a run, "putting in the miles", and getting through tough workouts.

The day-to-day was never hard for me. I had no simple advice for the questioner who asked "how do you get out the door when you just don't want to?" The motivation was intrinsic. It was implied that a single workout was packaged into a whole movement to get better. That desire easily overrode short term pain and discomfort. I've always enjoyed the process of training. Setting small, numerical goals on the fly brings great pleasure when they're achieved.

But motivation hasn't been flowing as seamlessly lately.

Finishing the Naples Half Marathon last month.
Not sure if it's a good thing, but I had the best pain face of the top 5 finishers...

When I started running professionally in 2014, I did not foresee my career continuing past age 30 and into the new decade. The fact that life as a full time athlete has survived this long is all at once a surprise, a life accomplishment of which I am proud, and occasionally a cause of anxiety (what have I missed out on during all those miles and years spent at the remote, North Carolina mountain outpost of ZAP?). The belief that my potential was not yet fully tapped at age 23 moved me to choose this path back then. The same conviction has tipped the scales in favor of staying in the game in the numerous times that doubts have crept in. 

For me, running's great challenge is not in everyday workout torture, race nerves, or injury woe, but the sheer long term compendium of failure, failure, success, and failure. Advancements are more few and far between. The scale of time spent on this project gets to me. An awful knowledge comes with expertise in one repetitive activity as the years pile up: it may be a very long period of working and waiting before you succeed again.

Every runner has a different story. I've enjoyed good luck in the form of great durability: a stress fracture in 2016 has been the only injury that's materially impacted my career. Instead of injury, the less obvious, wishy-washily "diagnosed" issues of mental and physical fatigue / burnout hunt me down me first. An injury is a malady with a usually obvious diagnosis and appropriate response; mild burnout, less so.

Throughout this fall and early winter, running felt disjointed. Recovery from the Berlin Marathon in late September was meant to flow smoothly into training for a handful of shorter Fall road and track races. I wanted to net some leg speed prior to the buildup for the Olympic Trials Marathon taking place in February. A mediocre 8k road race in Richmond and a very poor race at the Manchester Road Race on Thanksgiving prompted me to pull out of the third planned race, an indoor 5k in Boston. I was concerned about being mentally and physically fried, and took another ten days fully off from running in order to re-set. The entire fall season felt like a false start, with not much gained. I jogged back to the blocks, did a little nervous dance, and got set again.

Georgia Clay Roads north of Tallahassee

When you've been through many cycles of highs and lows, the task begins to feel Sisyphusean. Getting motivated to climb back towards a peak in your potential looks daunting ("here we go again"). But running is practically by definition a sport based around getting back in the saddle time and time again. The belief that a breakout could be just around the corner keeps us going. Though on some mornings before the run gets moving, that notion feels like gambler's fallacy. Too often lately, I look at the pile of experiential data behind me: what's worked and hasn't, and indulge in reasoning that tends toward the negative side. 

The thing is, running isn't really rational. There's art in it. Exploiting the weird gaps and being dumb helps you win.

I am aware of what it takes to be great at this sport. I believe I possess the physical tools required. What sucks about being human is that you can know what mental and emotional states will get you there, but sometimes find it difficult to access them. For me, simply having fun and being excited about what I'm doing are the most important basic ingredients in getting my body to translate training into performance. Though sometimes a combination of revisiting past failure and occasional depression keeps me from maintaining that positive state continuously. 

The greatest fear that comes with all this is that ambition will be stifled by my own weakness, rather than outside forces beyond my control. I could live with having failed because of, say, bad luck, the weather, or chance illness. But knowing that a negative mindset kept me from my goals would be a personal hell.

So I attempt to treat these thoughts not as some abstract, uncontrollable monster but as any old running injury. Something that you acknowledge is there, take steps to treat, and which eventually heals. I try to isolate negative thoughts from the rest of my mind and refuse to believe they've become the norm. This is simply the current challenge in a sport that doesn't let anyone sail smoothly forever. 

Strides on the track in Tallahassee with my fellow ZAPsters Matt, Andrew, and Tyler

Though I've fought a slight uphill battle with my mind, the more tangible conditions of the present are positive. I'm healthy and training on schedule for an Olympic Trials Marathon race that is now less than four weeks away. Behind me are over three consecutive years of uninterrupted training and the residual strength of three marathons (California International, Grandmas, and Berlin) run in the past 14 months. The ZAP team is deep into our annual winter training camp in Tallahassee. Everyone's goals are aligned and focused on the Trials, making training and life around our extended stay hotel in Tallahassee feel even more of a collective effort than usual.

As the trials race draws nearer, I'm finding it easier to run with inspiration and have fun at practice with the ZAP crew. The message I'm being sent is clear: I still relish the opportunity to compete. I'm putting no pressure on myself. Just running my own best race on February 29th in Atlanta will mean that I can negotiate a crappy mental patch and still go through preparation and execution like I always have. That in itself would be great experience for the next time running or life feel disjointed, but a goal still stands to be taken.

Thanks for reading. Here are some upcoming races and tentative races:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
February 29	Olympic Marathon Trials	Atlanta, GA	Marathon (NBC 12pm EST)
May 8	Payton Jordan Invite ?	Palo Alto, CA	Track 10,000m ?
June 7	Portland Track Festival ?	Portland, OR	Track 10,ooom ?
June 19-28	Olympic T&F Trials ?	Eugene, OR	Track 5,000m / 10,000m ?