Running Shorts

Suffering from post-Olympics withdrawal? Turn on USA channel to find Law & Order instead of table tennis? Don't know what to do without sports on 24/7? Unsure of how to schedule out a day that doesn't revolved around a combination of live streaming, DVR recording, and spoiler avoiding? Yeah, me too. Which means it's the perfect time to talk about the Olympics that just happened! One week out, here are four of my biggest takeaways -- two about Athletics in general and two about the distance slate specifically. 1. Athletics (because that's what the rest of the world calls it) remains the premier event in the Olympics.  While in America NBC played up the swimming and women's gymnastics competitions -- because American dominance plays into the "America #1 heck yeah!" narrative -- the Athletics events were by far the most prestigious of the games. From the iconic marathon final on the last day (with the medal ceremony at the closing ceremony) to the Wor...

So it's been about four years in the making, but I'm now going to the Olympic Marathon Trials. I ran the B-Standard qualifying time, I've registered for the Trials race (most reasonably priced marathon ever, by the way), and I've bough the plane tickets to LA. I'm all in. Well now what? What do you do after you finally run that cathartic qualifying time? You recover, race a 10k on Thanksgiving, and then hop into marathon training. I've spent the past two weeks taking training pretty light. The first week was very unstructured, just lots of easy mileage to get my legs back to feeling good. This past week was a little bit of a step up, with more mileage and some more tune-up workouts. This coming week I'm racing Cincinnati's classic Thanksgiving Day Race (if you'll be there come say hi!), looking to get after it  a few weeks removed from Indy Monumental. I don't want to go into the race with too many expectations, but suffice it to say I'...

I bombed a race this past weekend. The Mill Race Half Marathon , to be specific. I ran 1:08:17 and finished a fading third. I came into the race with high expectations. A few weeks ago I wrote a post about going to the well in workouts, specifically citing my 4-3-2 mile intervals run at 5:00 pace. Based on that effort, I knew I was ready to challenge the Olympic Trials standard of sub-1:05 -- and the plan was to go for it at the Mill Race last weekend. I had all my splits planned for the race: 5k at 15:25, 10k at 30:50, 15k at 46:15, 10 mile @ 49:35, even 12 mile at 59:30. Given past years' competition, I knew there would be some fast Africans, so the strategy was to tuck into the pack and stay as comfortable as possible, looking for the splits to stay on target. If I was on pace and feeling good at 10k, then I'd go for; if I was off pace or struggling, then I'd back off and save it for another day. So when we went through 10k at 31:15 and I was already hurting , I kn...

Finishing place: ??? Time: 15:10-ish (?) Photo courtesy of Shelton Graves Alright, so this was my third time doing this event, and it was by far my best performance here. In 2013 I entered in a weird limbo between marathon recovery and hard interval training, and so nothing translated to a quality race performance. Last year I had run a great race three weeks earlier, but then strained my hamstring and didn't run very much leading up to the Blast, which showed in a poor race. This year I entered in a good training rhythm after a solid block of base training. Only problem: it was a solid block of base training . I was in great fundamental shape, but not great race shape (especially a race as short as a 5k and competitive as this one). So I had to temper my expectations a bit...I knew I wasn't going to be competitive with the top runners going 14:20-30; for me at this point a sub-15 would be a great time on this course. Having those tempered expectation, I had to stay ...

Here in Cincinnati it's the doldrums of winter. There's 9 inches of snow on the ground and it's been so cold that none of it is melting. And yet...spring marathon season is right around the corner. People here are in the thick of training for the Flying Pig, which is barely two months away. And on top of that, track season starts up in a couple weeks! High schoolers (and college athletes) all around the city -- around the country, really -- are about to dust off the cobwebs and start training some get-down speed. As a lifelong track nerd, nothing says spring quite like freshly melted snow on a March track. That's right around the corner. So with all that in mind, I wanted to pass along some motivation: You're not as good as your last race. You're as good as your best day, and that day has yet to come. Right off the bat, that may not sound motivating. You're telling me that I'm not as fast as I just ran? What the hell, man? But stop for a second. Th...