I had a blog in progress after the Hoka One One Adrian Martinez Classic meet describing my roller coaster of a segment spanning from October to the present day. It was filled with honesty and emotion. It carefully explained my dreadful racing and each poor outcome, and used language that avoided excuses. I was excited to post it and get a lot off my chest. Then I read it over and decided that nothing written within its lines held a lot of meaning to anyone else but myself. So I deleted it.
My opinion on blogs is that I don’t think I need to use them to explain myself. Any race result speaks for itself. Good or bad, the emotion afterwards is going to be pretty self-explanatory. Posting them seems to be a way to just reassure one’s self about the outcome or, as I’ve used blogs for in the past, a way to say that there will be a comeback. I know my following believes in me and that a bad day is only temporary. Generally speaking, flukes don’t happen in this sport. Injury/body limitations or a person’s internal dialogue is all that stops success and if a good time has been recorded, there can be more. So why jump on a blog to explain my 29:39 10k at Stanford or a near last place finish at the Indoor Championships in February. I don’t think I need to.
Since those races, I won a road race in Newport, New Jersey, recorded a new 5k PR, and demolished my 3k PR. As each of these results passed, my usual following has trickled in with remarks such as, “I knew it was in there” and, “It’s good to see you racing well again” and, “Wow! You didn’t suck this time!” I didn’t need to tell any of these people that I was racing poorly. They know my standards and they know not to text me after the bad ones.
So, instead of posting that original blog, I have decided to post an in-depth look at all of my training from October 31, 2016 through this weekend’s U.S. Outdoor Championships. This way I don’t have to explain anything. You can just look through each and every day of running and see what I did. Easy days are pretty self-explanatory, but every workout is described with splits or a timetable and I’ve shared at least something about each that includes mental notes or how I did against teammates. I feel like this is a better way to let people into the development of this season and how I’ve approached trying to get over the gross results.
A little background on the days and months leading up to 10/31/16. I had two achilles tendon flare ups (right and left) that occurred almost simultaneously. The first happened in April ’16 and the second was September ’16. In the middle of them, I was able to get back to running but when training got back to a heavy intensity, the other achilles let go. It was very frustrating but with the help of John Ball and Flagstaff’s Hypo2 team, I was able to begin running again in October and run my first race back in December after missing 8 months of competition. This was my worst injury to date and the longest I rode the bench in any sport.
Below is my first 6 weeks of training (TABS) from 10/31/16 to the USATF Club Cross Country Championships in Florida in December. I will be posting a new block of training every day this week!