Running Shorts

Despite the lack of activity on the blog, I have in fact been running. I did have brief Achilles flare-up in August and into September which derailed my original plans for a fall marathon (and even backup plans for a half marathon). I stayed active, but I had lost enough fitness that it wouldn't come back quickly enough for that season. However, I had a slight epiphany while I was injured: as I was cycling a lot, I saw how popular cyclocross was, and for the first time since college I missed racing cross country. As luck would have it, USATF Club XC was being hosted in December in Lexington, KY -- an easy drive only an hour and a half away and enough time to round into some semblance of racing shape. To sum up training, I did a six-week block of fundamental base-type workouts, which I then blended into about six more weeks of race-specific ones. I was definitely overly cautious with my training, because I didn't want to aggravate any injuries (I'm still managing my ...

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...

With the Olympics coming up in a couple of weeks, I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It would be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps. A New Calendar of Competition This proposal to fix the sport is going to focus on track and field; specifically, the outdoor competition schedule. Or, rather, the lack thereof. The current calendar is...a mess, to put it mildly. Once every four years there is an incredibly important global championship -- the Olympics. In odd-numbered non-Olympic years, there is another global championship, albeit somewhat less meaningful. In even-numbered non-Oly...

With the Olympics coming up in three weeks, I thought this would be the perfect time for a three-part series about the state of the sport. After all, this is the one time every four years when people outside of the insular track world actually care about athletics. It wold be easy to come up with a list of complaints about the sport; however, I'm deciding to take a positive outlook (on both the topic and my own running performance), so instead I'm going to fix running (and jumping and throwing) in three easy steps. Shamateurism to Professionalism Athletics exists in a state of shamateurism . On the one hand, it is a professional sport, in that individuals athletes can make money from it (how much they actually make is appalling, but still...). On the other hand, athletics is governed by amateur rules that directly limit the ability of its professional athletes to make money. It's this weird, nebulous purgatory that definitely isn't amateur but isn't fully profes...

Some days you have it, some days you don't. With training and tapering, of course, you hope to have it on race day. On February 13th 2016 in the heat of Los Angeles, I most definitely didn't have it. On a day that was a battle for everybody, I was one of the many riding the struggle bus. About 60 of the 160-ish men that started the race did not finish, myself included. I made it about 10 miles into the race before calling it a day and stepping off the course. I actually felt pretty good on my short warmup jog. I fell into aerobic threshold effort real easy and was primed to go. The first two miles, even in the mass of humanity, were right about where I wanted to be: 5:25 and then 5:18, right on. I latched onto a group that felt like it was going the right effort, ready to hang on for a ride to a solid time. But by the time we got to 10k, I knew I was in trouble. That's a scary feeling when you're hurting and you realize there are still twenty miles left in the ...

So take this with a grain of salt: I haven't raced a marathon in nearly three years, and of the two that I've finished neither have been particularly noteworthy. When I was in college, the 10,000m folks on Xavier's team had a saying about the 10k on the track: "controlled aggression released over 25 laps." For those who've never had the distinct pleasure of racing the track 10,000, you're not really missing out. On a bad (or even mediocre) day, it consists of a special kind of hell involving monotonous, mind-numbing misery. When you're off your game, the laps drag by. When you're on, they fly. Keeping that attitude ("controlled aggression released over 25 laps") helped keep us present in the race. Staying patient, racing in the moment, not thinking too far ahead ( don't think about the finish before the final mile... ) combine to create a positive experience. You focus on the race at hand -- not the finish -- and the results will ...

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...

Alright. It sucks to write about this stuff. If you're a runner, you've probably heard about this by now. If not, here's the brief (real brief) synopsis of the report that's rocked the sport in the last couple weeks: basically, Alberto Salazar, Galen Rupp, and the Nike Oregon Project have been accused of various levels of doping over the past decade-plus. David Epstein wrote an article in ProPublica here , and the BBC produced an hour-long documentary which is on YouTube . If you haven't read or watched those yet, do it. Salazar and the NOP have long been known for using every resource at their disposal to get the best results out of their athletes: underwater treadmills, anti-gravity treadmills, team houses fit to simulate altitude, the best coaching staff that Nike can pay for (and Nike has a lot of money). However, in elite running circles, there have long been rumors swirling about NOP using drugs and supplements in ways that push the boundaries of the rules...

How did you first get into running?  It's a pretty innocuous question, but it's one that every runner gets asked at some point in his/her career. And, if you really take the time to think about, it's a really interesting question. How did you get into running? Out of all the sports there are to choose from -- basketball, baseball, football, soccer, etc. -- why did you end up just running? For me, I was always running. Both my dad and uncles were runners; competitive in high school and college, but also age-group competitive once us kids came around. I grew up with runners are role models, so the sport was something I was drawn to. But I was also a bit lucky: Mariemont had a recreational track program for elementary kids. Just like everyone played SAY soccer, little league baseball, or rec basketball growing up (I did all those things, too) my neighborhood also had a youth track team. So every spring we would "practice" one evening per week and then spend al...

Just a quick post today for some shameless self-promotion. I was recently picked as the 2014 RUNOHIO magazine male co-runner of the year . Pretty cool! What makes it even cooler is that the other runner who was picked along with me is Harvey Lewis, my former student-teaching mentor. Yup, while I student-taught in 2013, Harvey was the teacher whose classes I took over. Recently he won the Badwater Ultramarathon and finished tied for second in the Arrowhead 135 . In April, he'll be representing the USA in the 24 Hour Running World Championships . So it's really cool to be honored alongside someone I've worked with. Anyway, got pick up a copy of the magazine at you local running store. Or, better yet, pick one up at your local Fleet Feet .

I did it. I solved the world's problems on a recent run. Runners have a tendency to do that sort of thing. So the central problem is this: how do you make running a more popular sport? Wait, what? I thought running was already hugely popular? Isn't that what this whole "running boom" thing has been for the past 15 years? Aren't there millions of people who finish races every year? For the nerds (like me), check out some of the stats here . But that's precisely the issue. Running is a wildly popular activity, but it's a fairly unpopular sport . Meaning, people all over the country participate in running -- they go for a run, join a training group, sign up for a road race, etc. -- but very few people follow the professional side. And what's really interesting is that as more and more people have taken up running, fewer and fewer people have been following the pros. Media coverage of the sport, while once a mainstay in Sports Illustrated and on ESPN...