Kind of defeats the purpose to be writing a prologue for 2025 when it’s already 2025 right? Well I’m not really known for doing things on time so here we are. It’s January 9th, 2025 and I’m currently killing time before I start my first run in over a week. Not ideal. But we’ll get there.
So I guess I’ll start with the purpose of all this.
Why am I doing this?
Well, I used to write a lot years ago. A decade ago I was blogging fairly consistently. I had time to do it as a kid with nothing but time on his hands until graduate school started. I’ve gone back and looked at that stuff from time to time. Mostly to chuckle a bit at the stupid ideas I had for training myself and how I was my own worse enemy. The former has changed for the better, the latter, well, what do you want me to say…
Anyways.
Honestly? I’ve had a pretty tough time finding that spark to be creative again. Not just creative, but even just the spark to commit myself to anything aside from most things outside of my career, running, a few choice relationships. Over the last couple of months I’ve realized that I haven’t really done a good job executing on things that I really want to do. I’ve found a lot of enjoyment with cataloging my experience trying this running thing again and the successes I’ve found through it. The medium of social media has really taken much of my motivation to do it though. The last year felt like everything was just a photocopy of whatever was popular/getting likes. Another new Runnerinstagram and the same reel reposted week by week. It’s not a knock on particular people but the combination of all of it has made that entire platform feel formulaic and unimaginative. And well, frustrating.
Enough ranting for now.
This year I want to get back to writing again. And I’m going to use the medium I pay a yearly fee for to do it. My goal is to try and post once a week, recapping how running has gone in the lead up to the California International Marathon 2025.
So let’s do a quick intro of where I’ve been. 2023 was the best year of my life. I set personal bests across every distance I toed the line at. The second half of it featured my most impressive performance of my running career thus far by a pretty good amount, a 2:19:13 Marathon in early December. That block left me pretty emotionally exhausted as I battled a training block with a nagging injury and what I thought was a challenge with a binary result, pass or fail. I wondered whether this was still an enjoyable endeavor as I limped through each run. Ultimately I found some rhythm when it mattered and while I did technically fail, the result was significantly better than I ever could’ve dreamed I could attain just a couple years ago.
2024. Well. It was a year of disappointments. I won my 50K in April but came 10 minutes short of a goal I thought was realistic. Cratering alone for the last hour plus in the freezing cold was about as humbling experience as I could’ve had. New York? Well, I still haven’t found the time or energy to finish that recap… From aiming for a top 40 finish to sprinting with all I had to get 100th. Disappointing is an understatement for 2024. But that’s running for ya. You can be fit but sometimes you just need the day to be right and I definitely didn’t expect anything that could go wrong go wrong in the span of two hours and thirty minutes. But that’s why we race. I’ve been lucky enough to be on the other side of that for so long. I’d rather the gods even the score a bit in a year that doesn’t matter than when it does again.
When is it again? Well I hope it’ll be at CIM? That’s if the USATF actually decides to announce an Olympic Trials Standard for 2028. What will that be? Who knows. Will it stay at 2:18? Will it move down to 2:17? Faster? Beats me. Regardless, I need to get my ass in gear to put myself in position to try.
2025 starts on a back step. I started to shake off an IT band issues while I was on vacation out west and then bang, sickness. I don’t know what kind of bug I got but it took me down from Thursday to now. I’m finally feeling like myself again. We’ll see how this goes.
That’s it for now. I’ll add more if I feel like it this week. If not? I’ll catch you next week.
Beers and Miles 