Heusden to Houston

A few years back, I mentioned to a college team mate that I was running a 5k in Heusden. It was July at the time. “Houston? Hopefully it won’t be too hot there.” Oh no, sorry, I said. Not Houston, Heusden - a little suburban town in Belgium. Heusden is to Brussels as New Jersey is to New York City. The nicer parts of Jersey, that is. And most Belgians don’t really commute. They ride bikes and walk places.

The summer European racing experience has been much doted upon in the blogs and Instagrams of many an American distance runner, myself included. Memories of riding a fart tube across the pond and trickling down through Ireland and over to Belgium from track race to track race each summer will always hold a beloved place in my heart.

Exploring the walls of Luxembourg, scarfing down the homey hospitality of Irish meet committees, climbing on castles, rolling ankles on cobblestones - this is what it’s meant to be a runner on the European ‘B’ track circuit. So far, my years as a professional runner have culminated in the annual July trip to Europe.

Heusden. The KBC Nacht Athletics Meeting held there every July is a must do if you’re a member of the extremely specific blood type American-middle-distance-runner-looking-to-make-it. It’s the meet a lot of people run fast at, but no one back home has really ever heard of. 

2013. It was my first year running Heusden (The statute of limitations is up on this war story). On a warm Belgian evening, the pacer for the ‘B’ heat of the 5,000m dropped out 3,000 meters into the race, leaving our nationally diverse pack of straining runners to propel each other to time standard glory on our lonesome own. Planters of carnations flicked by our feet on the infield. Avicii or something similar played from the press box. A kid dropped his waffle in the grass.

Last year's 5,000m in Heusden. Photo Fabienne Nicolas

As usually happens in these races, the pace slacked with about three laps to go. I decided to be a brash 23 year old (what’s my age again?), put myself on the sacrificial goat side of things, and push the pace at the front of the race. It works, sometimes. Other times it doesn’t.

My goal of 13:30 was in reach on the backstretch of the final lap. “All” I had to do was run a 45 second last 300 meters.

But I ran a 49, and a 13:34, and rode the late bus home to Leuven, the best little medieval, circular town in Europe, pleased with my effort but disappointed with the result.

The Heusden after party in Leuven is also famous amongst those of the aforementioned athlete-traveler persuasion. Stella Artois world HQ is in Leuven, and the beer is cheaper by the glass than water at restaurants in the square at the center of town. The Heusden 5k was to be my final race of the season. We drank a lot of Stella, danced our faces off, and didn’t go home until the sky woke up.

But also not before Aric Van Halen mentioned he was running a 3,000m over in Kortrijk later that day, Sunday, an hour’s train ride away, and would I run it too? On a whim, the last thing I did before collapsing drunkenly on my mattress in our small apartment was enter myself in the Kortrijk meet online.

I woke up feeling surprisingly good. Chugged some water, went for a walk, and ate a Doner Kebab. It was well past noon. Maybe I would go run this 3k in Kortrijk for the hell of it. You don’t think at a deep level when you have a hangover. In this case, that turned out to be the ticket.

…To a win and 3k personal best of 7:49 for 3,000m in Kortrijk. I don’t remember feeling any pain. The good ones sometimes go that way. Your body sends less stress signals. My brain was fuzzy from a long night out. It said shut up! to the any high rpm thoughts trying to escape my prefrontal cortex. 

I spent a few more years chasing times and a breakthrough across the country and world.

Zap Fitness training run in beloved Todd, NC.

2018. I’m 28, and on Sunday morning, I really did run in Houston - the one in big Texas. Not a 5k, but a half marathon. That’s right, I’m allowed to plant a 13.1 sticker on my bike. Yeah, I run. (It actually technically wasn’t my debut. My brother, David beat me up in a half in Milwaukee in what seems like an earlier life.)

When we planned for it back in September, the Houston half marathon represented a literal and figurative change of pace for my running career.  My body had to get used to running 100+ mile weeks again. I dubbed November “niggle November” for the roughly seven moderate injuries that paraded through my muscles and joints that month with the increased workload. Above all, I looked forward to trying something other than than chasing increasingly elderly personal bests on the track.

And then, around the time the new year hit, just two weeks before Houston, I entered a mental rough patch.

I’ve been running professionally for nearly five years now, and it’s been exhilarating, heartbreaking, fun, boring, enlightening, maddening, and the best thing I could imagine myself doing. When you start out after college, you have a gas tank full of excitement and expectation for the future. It gets you through the hard days and bad performances, helping you come back hungry. But it leaks and gets used up. It becomes exponentially harder to improve, so you sift through a long string of new mindsets, subtly different training methods, and meditation rituals.

You look around and realize that most of your colleagues, the runners your age, who you raced when you were kids, have hung up the spikes, have “real jobs”, are married and having kids of their own. American society does a double take when you say you run for a living. And the the longer you do it, the stranger it is. All runners are weirdos, and we thrive on it. But sometimes it’s hard to keep weird. (Maybe I need to visit a former home - Austin, TX).

Agony and ecstasy. Photo Jason Honeycutt

Coming into Houston, running didn’t exactly feel new and shiny anymore. Maybe I was afraid I’d bomb the race. It would mean failing to grab ahold of the life preserver that the half marathon was trying to throw me from the horizon-bound sail boat of my running career.

Feeding my dark mood was a the fact that my big toes and feet had been suddenly and randomly losing control and going floppy at faster paces, especially after longer periods of running. So like, exactly what the half marathon entails. Those symptoms point to a funky sciatic nerve. There was no pain, but my foot plant was being affected, causing my calves to tighten up. And a small mechanical problem could add up over 13.1 miles.

I’ve looked back to that summer 2013 weekend in Heusden and Kortrijk, Belgium for inspiration and example many times. Not for the wild night, but for the place my mind was in when I started the 3,000 on the second day. My brain was animal, then. It didn’t care. It was blind to outside factors.

I had to get my sh*t together for this race in Houston. I had trained too hard to let myself get distracted by the future, or where else and what else I could be doing.

It started getting easier when we left our hotel in Tallahassee for travel to Houston on Thursday. Easier with the familiarity of airports and flights, by now strong associations with race weekends, sizing up competitors in hotel lobbies, feeling the tractor beam of excitement and nervousness beginning to suck us all towards the adrenaline moment of the starting gun on Sunday morning.

When I began feeling these things, I knew I was safe, safe in running. My instincts would handle everything. I was trained.

On Saturday, the day before the race, some of the elite runners in the race spoke in front of a large group of Houston kids who’d run a 5k that morning. One of their questions was typical of these kinds of sessions, and went something like

“what do you guys think about, like in your heads, when you run? How do you keep from wanting to stop?”

Wanting to stop is at the core of running. You heard it from a twelve year old.

When the mic came my way, I had time, and space, and temporality in my head, themes in these less than happy several weeks. I evoked the teachings of Master Yoda in my best impression:

“All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was... what he was doing.”

I told them: be in the mile you’re in, in the footstep you’re in, not thinking about how far there is to go. Back in the hotel room I re-watched the scene with Luke Skywalker and Yoda on Degobah in The Empire Strikes Back. Chills. I hopped up and did another round of neural flossing for my sciatic nerve.

The half and full marathons start at the same time in Houston. 7:00am. They share the same route for about seven miles before the half course turns off and heads back downtown to the finish. One mile into the race, I found myself running in the full marathon lead pack. Their pacer was assigned to hit halfway in 1:03:00, perfect for me. But by mile three it was clear the marathoners were rolling just a tad slower than I wanted. I peeked around the side of their lead truck. Up the road, Matt and the half marathon chase pack were a block of vacant pavement away.

Decision time. Pass the truck, dive into the vacumn, and hope for help from a fellow white-bibbed half marathoner? Or stay put and wait?

I went around the truck. Moments later, a small but powerful figure materialized on my shoulder in the form of Luis Orta, Venezuela’s star runner. Luis and I ran the entire remainder of the race together, bouncing moments of fatigue and spurts of energy off each other as we tackled Houston block by block.  My foot strike got numb and floppy at a few points, but by relaxing and not dwelling on it I kept it in the background. We never did gain ground on Matt’s group, but with each other’s presence we could exist in what would have been no man’s land. The sun rose, all golden light and signpost shadows, during mile four.

Luis Orta and I kicking to the finish in Houston. Photo Michael Scott

Luis and I battled all the way to the line, catching some good scalps in the final 200 meters. He just out-leaned me to break the Venezuelan half marathon record.

In the end, Houston and a debut at the half marathon distance gave me what I needed. I ran 63:35, a good time, not a breakout performance, but enough to be proud of. Sitting here five days later I’m still feeling the delicious soreness in my quads and hamstrings left by Houston’s pavement. It feels good to have a new personal best. Damn good, actually. Even if it’s a first go. I like that the distance feels so different than the stinging pain of a track 5,000m - like a novella that does some unfolding before you’re through with it. 

Writing this in Tallahassee during a little down week in training, I think I have my spark back. I’m looking forward to another debut. Somehow, I’ve made it all this way never having run a 10,000m on the track. 25 laps fits snugly between the new experience of 13.1 miles on the road and the quick pace of the 5,000m, a world I’m quite well versed in.

Winning is fun. Being healthy and happy and PR’ing is fun. Especially when these things come easy, like in Kortrijk. When I drank a bunch of beer and shouldn't have run well, but did. The memory of that race is a curse, too, for how little I had to struggle for success. A simultaneously good and bad example from the past, for the future.

They're amazing, the intangibles in running. In any endeavor, for that matter. Wanting to stop, and then not having stopped - that's how you win.

It’s nice when life goes your way. But no one gets these things all the time.

If you did, you’d know nothing about yourself.

Here are some things I'm looking forward to:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
March 30	Raleigh Relays	Raleigh, NC	Track 1500
April 14	B.A.A. 5k	Boston, MA	Road 5k
May 3	Payton Jordan Invite	Palo Alto, CA	Track 10,000m
June 21 - 24	USATF Outdoor Championships	Des Moines, IA	Who knows?
July 4	Peachtree Challenge	Atlanta, GA	Road 10k

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

Warming Up the Turkey

Before dawn, the sky black at the edges, stars number enough to reveal individual leaves' outlines in trees.  As the star quilted sky sweeps into view from above the house’s eaves, a meteor tears across the southern sky, extinguished and then reignited briefly, insane speed and energy dissipated mutely.  Orion hunts, slowly arcing from horizon to horizon.  The time before the beginning of a day.

Several hundred cubic fathoms of beer, immeasurable megawatt-hours worth of sun exposure, inundation in two each of ocean and great lake, multiple minor non-running related injuries involving jellyfish, rope swings, sidewalks, waterfalls, and physical feats a by definition athletically one-dimensional distance runner generally just shouldn’t be attempting, and 14 additional pounds of baggage later, I'm back to running after a cathartic six week break. I needed it. I sort of limped through the outdoor track season on a crutch of ibuprofen, running on a hip with internal workings that just, well, couldn't even. 

Motivating my recent demotivation were two people: the great Kenyan marathoner Paul Tergat, who purportedly took several years off every fall and gained innumerable kilograms, returning to running just rarin to rip heads off. His running career lasted at an international level well into his thirties.  And Pete, our coach at Zap Fitness, who told me I needed to finally let my usually pretty not-injury-prone physique actually rest for more ten days for once, for crying out loud. He had good reason.

Lucky enough to never have suffered from anything worse than achilles tendinitis (knocks on skull), I've never taken a break from training of more than twelve days since high school. Many runners would kill a fly for that kind of durability, but those long term injuries replenish your physical and mental energy stores.   Beside allowing the soft tissue in my hip to heal, pure off time would let the head scratching inducing symptoms of long-term overtraining subside.  I imagine fatigue from one season rolling over to the next season across relatively short ten to fourteen day breaks and compounding a runner to death later on.   Simulating a major injury and taking several weeks off could be the change in training I needed having spent several seasons on a plateau running similar track and road performances.  So Pete applied a jackhammer to my shins.

Just kidding. But for 42 days I wasn't a runner, or even an active human except for some hiking and canoeing.  And Pokemon Go.  Sue me.  Going cold turkey is hard, but I reminded myself that even though my lifestyle closely matched that of Jaba the Hut, minus the weird frog things he heats, the runner within was being given a breather for the work and competition to come.  Whenever thoughts of training started leaking in, I'd reach for another beer.  At two weeks the strangeness of not running faded as hormones stabilized, the metabolism slowed down, and my body got used to not being stressed each morning and afternoon with a run.  At a month I was the one shouting run Forest run.  But in the third trimester of my training holiday, with the Olympics on full blast and inspired by the hugely successful US distance and middle distance olympic teams, I was ready to return to running like I never have been before.  

Week one was rough.  “left, right, left, right, port, starboard” I told my legs, ambulating at greater than three m.p.h. for the first time since early July.  It made me respect the fitness I’ve retained continually for over a decade.  In fits and starts my legs have come around since the break ended.  As uncomfortable as the first few runs were, being “out of shape” provides a good point of reference.  It’s kind of fun to feel the tangible gains made almost daily when you’re starting from a lower point: sure, you have a long way to go, but runners are happiest when we’re climbing.*

Last month’s Cameron Bean Memorial 5k and Magnum Mile in Chattanooga, Tennessee provided a timely mental and spiritual boost for the return to being a runner.  Normally we wouldn’t race or work out so soon after returning to training, but I couldn’t miss Cam’s run.  It’s been almost a year since our Zap teammate Cameron died, and getting to run that morning with Zap team mates past and present, Zap campers, and over 650 people who knew Cameron and to hear how he inspired them in life completely reassured me I’m doing the right thing by working to achieve the kind of goals Cameron set and lived by.  Despite it being so early in training, I ran the evening’s very well put on Magnum Mile event balls to the wall because Cam would have done the same.  I was pretty happy with a 4:25 road mile off no training, although my legs were not pleased the next day.

Aaron, Brandon, and I running a 7-6-5-4-3 fartlek
on Bass Lake in Blowing Rock last week

Team at Zap Fitness has been another big source of energy and inspiration for me in the early stages of this new buildup.  Running after college is a hard road/trail/track, and the team has changed a lot since I started running for Zap over three years ago.  I have a good relationship with everyone who’s run here and moved on, and I draw on the young energy we now have on the roster.  Like Count Trackcula.  Johnny Crain, Matt McClintock, Brandon Doughty, and Aaron Nelson all moved into our facility and campus on Blackberry Road late this summer, and their excitement for training at this level and competing on the professional circuit spreads to the seasoned members of the team, keeping things fresh and in perspective.  When you live, run, eat, cut the grass, and sleep together†, good interaction within the group begets good living and effective training.  

This was a natural transition year between being an early post collegiate runner and being a better experienced and hungrier athlete not afraid to set lofty goals.  The best running is ahead.  For now I’m training until November, when I’ll run two road races, including (my favorite) the Manchester Road Race on Thanksgiving morning.  In December we’ll begin our cross country campaign with Zap as we run for the team title at the USATF Club Cross Country Championships in Tallahassee.  In January we’ll compete in several cross country meets across Scotland, Italy, Spain, and Portugal in preparation for February’s US Cross Country Championships held in Bend, Oregon.  With lots of cross country on the schedule, I’ll enter the outdoor track season strong and prepared to race into the end of the summer.

So we move into one of my favorite times of the year: when the smell of leaves and decay on the dry breeze and chilly mornings bring on olfactory nostalgia and mean hard, long training runs on dirt and grass and other rustic surfaces‡, and when those first anxious memories of competitive running formed for a high school freshman who didn’t know where this after school activity would take him.  You fall§ in love with the tired, sore feeling in your legs that pervades your days.  The feeling of accomplishment as you train for those short and rare moments when your goals are at their most vulnerable, ripe for breaking.  The trail to those days is long and full of switchbacks, manticores, man, a lot of core, and as I’ve said, many Coors.  Our objective is to run faster times, qualify for bigger meets, and win championships, but you can’t forget who climbs the trail with you, and even those who conspire to beat you to the top, because they have a funny way of becoming your friends too.  Without them, there’s no one to share the glory of running with.

Thanks for reading.  Here's my upcoming race schedule:

Date	Race Name	Location	Venue / Distance
November 12	HCA 8k	Richmond, VA	Road 8k
November 24	Manchester Road Race	Manchester, CT	Road 4.748 miles
December 10	USATF Club Cross Country Championships	Tallahassee, FL	Cross Country 10k
January 7	Great Edinburgh XCountry ‖	Edinburgh, Scotland	Cross Country 8k
February 4	USATF Cross Country Championships	Bend, OR	Cross Country 12k

- - - - - - -
Digressions

* The derivative of my fitness with respect to time is positive and large, and right now I might even venture to say that its second derivative is positive, meaning my fitness is increasing at an increasing rate.  All of this provides good momentum against the inevitable cooling off the second derivative into negative territory and the slowing of my fitness increase to zero hopefully exactly when I want it to, say next summer at an important competition, again ideally at an absolute value of fitness greater than I’ve ever reached before.
† In extended stay hotels and European dorm rooms
‡ How to say 'soft surfaces' with class

§ Pun premeditated
‖ Qualification required