Praying and Running

OK, let's get it out of the way to begin with. The race was the definition of suffer-fest. It took me nearly a month to recover mentally. If this is the first post of mine you have read, I spent the last 8 weeks of the cycle literally limping by with a strained groin muscle so when I toed the line on 4/21, muscle still pulled, I was as under-trained as I have ever been heading into a race.. All of that aside, before the injury I was in the best shape of my life and by a whole lot at that. I had a very aggressive goal of 2:49:59 and the week or so before I got hurt I was thinking that I would be in shape to make 2:49:59 look like child's play. I had 8 or 9 weeks left and I could have run a 2:49:59 at  that point. In fact on 2/22/2014 I ran a very tough workout. It was supposed to be 16 miles with 12 at marathon pace. I felt so good I tacked another 4 on the end for a cool down. I just remember how satisfied I was with that run. You can read about it yourself here. This ...

Running; for me it is not an individual effort. I have said it many time and many ways and I'm going to say it one more time. I couldn't run like I do with out a whole lot of help and this year the Boston Marathon and the training cycle that proceeded it just magnified that fact. If you haven't already read the race report you can find it here . As you might imagine I had support and encouragement from everywhere, social media, work, church, the gym I belong to. It was the Boston Marathon after all. Even people who have no interest in running know about and respect this historic road race. But when I got hurt 8 weeks out there were 3 people who really stepped it up and helped me limp through the last 8 weeks and without them I wouldn't have been able to run Boston at all and I'd like to take a minute to thank them. First of all, to deal with my injury I went to St. Vincent Sports Performance in Carmel which is about 45 minutes from my house. The doctor set me up w...

This half marathon was less than 2 weeks out from the Boston Marathon. When I got my entry for Boston I knew this wasn't going to be a half that I would PR in but past that I wasn't really sure how I would do so I held off on setting any goals for this race until late last week. If you read my Boston race report you know it took a lot out of me. Honestly, I am usually way more recovered by now. I think it was Wednesday or Thursday before the race that I even attempted to set some vague goals. I was still feeling pretty beat up and on top of that I had gone to a couple of CrossFit classes earlier in the week and was suffering from a bad case of DOMS. So, I settled for the goals of sneaking in under 1:30 and getting a top 500 finish (special "500 club" medal for that). Even these goals were based mostly on vanity and not really on what I was confident that I could go out and do and as such they actually caused me a great deal of anxiety. This race has become a fami...