Running Shorts

Disclaimer: This is a history post...I am a history teacher, after all. You're about to get a history lesson. Fair warning. Last year around Thanksgiving, I wrote a brief cumulative history of Cincinnati's 100+ year-old Thanksgiving Day Race . It's a great local tradition that I look forward to racing every year; however, it turns out that most cities and towns have their own turkey trot traditions. (Heck, Buffalo's race is even older than Cincinnati's.) For thousands of runners across the country, road races are a Thanksgiving tradition. We don't often think of them like that, but the community turkey trot belongs in the conversation with turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, and football as Thanksgiving staples. As it turns out, we can trace the legacy of running (racing) all the way back to the first Thanksgiving in 1621. Running has a stronger tie to the initial holiday than stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, etc - foods which weren't served at t...

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'...

Hey blogosphere, sorry for the month-long hiatus. I got a little-stitious in the lead up to Indy Monumental and was worried that I was doing a little too much talking (well, writing) and not enough training. This is the race report I posted on reddit recapping the race, so I thought I'd re-post it here as well. Hey reddit! I'm mostly a lurker here, but I raced Saturday morning in Indianapolis and wanted to share. The TL;DR: I ran 1:04:33 for the half marathon, which qualifies me for the US Olympic Marathon Trials in LA this February. I also got 3rd overall, which was pretty cool, too. So anyway, here goes... But first, a shout-out to the staff at Monumental Those guys know how to put on a top-notch race. It's so refreshing to here the rhetoric coming out of the organization that says, "we're trying to be a professional event; we understand that most people want a fun event, but we also understand that some people want to come and  race  the damn thing; we...