Catching Up, Part 2: Lessons Learned

Hello again friends. Welcome to Part 2 of our latest catch up, en route to, yes you heard right, a ✨👟marathon race report👟✨ (by which, just to be clear, I mean a race report about a marathon, not just, like, a **really long** race report).

Catching Up: Part 1 (icymi)

Where were we? Oh yes! End of July 2025; missing out on Tracksmith SF 5000; recovering from a horrific back strain. Let us move on to late summer.

In general, the plan was:

• Mid August ➡️ train for & run a one-mile time trial on the track
• Late August ➡️ Tahoe vacation with family
• September ➡️ Start training for CIM

AUGUST

In which the future was still so bright (in many ways). My back continued to feel fine; I continued to rip fast workouts on the track without worrying too much about building overall mileage. Having run a 6:28 mile on the roads in May with, like, two weeks of mile-specific training, I was very curious what I could manage on the track in spikes having spent the summer doing honest-to-gods speed work. 6:20? 6:15? Faster?? I tried getting a group together for a time trial day (mostly for my own selfish rabbiting purposes) but at that point people were mostly busy getting ready for other things so I ended up going it alone. On a weirdly humid August 17 I drove to the track, did a little warm-up and some strides, put my spikes on, and did my best to flog myself to one all-out mile, with not-terrible results: 

Catching Up, Yet Again: Part 1

Heyyyyy friends 👋👋👋 Long time no post. Such is life; things take crazy turns and suddenly writing about one's hobbies on the internet no longer falls into the top ten most critical tasks to be spending ostensible free time on. However, I HAVE JUST RUN A MARATHON and I feel that needs to be immortalized in these digital pages one way or another, so I'm making time.

But first, we need some context. This series of catch-up posts ends in a race report, but it's a race report that won't make a ton of sense without quickly (well, relatively quickly) buzzing back through the last seven months. So, without further ado......

Where We Left Off

Last we spoke, I had just run a pretty solid track 5K in Oakland (June 19), with plans to spend four weeks getting even faster, then run another track 5K in San Francisco on July 19.  Things went okay for a couple of weeks, and then, in retrospect, I started getting a bunch of messages from my body that ** Hey we are not okay, maybe take a few days off here **, but none of them were ever, like, BRIGHT BLINKING RED and/or I was just so distracted by everything else going on in life that it never really hit me all at once the way it should have.