Pace runs! Pace runs are interesting. I’m at a weird point right now where I have like three kind of piled up inside a week, with a four mile pace run last Friday then a seven miler this morning and I’ll do five on this Friday (all with a warm-up mile tacked on the start) and then it’ll be a slight break from those for a bit. Today’s was overall slower than Friday’s as I’m consciously trying to play with pace and figure out what actually feels maintainable (and also doing more than one of these a week feels like A Lot!) but I still averaged out to something I’d be beyond thrilled to maintain for, hmm let me check my notes here, like five more miles than that, what the?!?

Anyways pace runs are kind of a lot! I’ll both miss them and not miss this version of them when I shift gears into marathon training mode after this half marathon cycle is done. I mean I still have them in the marathon plan but I sure as heck won’t be trying to maintain this version of pace for that long a run. They do make for an interesting challenge, though I’m wavering quite a bit on just how much I’m looking forward to them each time they come up in the schedule.

It’s also weird to be back up to that point when—an eight mile run, period, like today’s, was once a huge stretch goal for a weekend long run, and now I’m doing it on a Tuesday morning and fast-for-me? Wild times.

Here are some more things for you.

• Jigsaw puzzles. You know what’s cool? Jigsaw puzzles. I’ve wanted to get into them for a while but it always sort of felt, like, a little corny, I guess? Like, oh, what are you doing with your free time, jigsaw puzzles, what? But then we went and had a couple kids and I’m a dad now and it’s like if I can’t go full cornball now when can I? In theory they were a fun thing we could set up and do with the kids here and there but in practice it’s been a lot of just me really getting into puzzles. My wife’s gotten sucked into a couple, for sure, and the kids do help, but they’re a bit more interested in the kid-strength puzzles than some of the bigger puzzles I’ve been drawn toward.

  • Like, I just finished this one, and it is an absolute beaut. Yes, Liberty Puzzles are a bit bougie, a bit the-Cadillac-of-puzzles, but I don’t even care, they’re so fun, they’re fun treats. That one I linked to was hard, too. Something about the format—that tall vertical orientation—and the fact that the colors are just all over the place…it kept me guessing for a while. (We recently just splurged and got the kids a couple of the kids’ Liberty puzzles (here and here) and they had a lot of fun with those.)

  • I’ve also enjoyed a couple of the puzzles from Piecework. (I did worry for her sanity when my wife was working on the Meta Puzzle.)

  • A while ago I cracked and got one of the Areaware gradient puzzles in blue-green and it’s not as hard as you think it’s going to be going into it? A little more meditative, a little more systematic of a build, once you get the frame done and have a sense of where pieces are going to land within it. I enjoyed.

  • Sometimes I wonder what kind of podcast I would start were I to start one knowing that nobody would listen to it and to that end it would be amusing to do a jigsaw puzzle podcast because why would anybody listen to that? What a silly idea.

• I’ve got a snake plant in my office and last year it had a baby down at the bulb or root level or whatever. I dug it up and sliced it off and repotted both and the baby’s doing fine I think though it’s a bit on the slow side. At least compared to the entire-ass second baby the original plant had right back off the point where I sliced off the first baby. I’ve left that one attached because what am I going to do, go into full time plant baby doctoring, here? And probably obviously but also much to my surprise the second baby is nuts. It’s about as tall as the original plant now. I mean it’s like over two times the size of the original separate baby. Anyways, snake plants are pretty cool, and you know who had a lot of snake plants? Fred and Renee Madison, the married couple from David Lynch’s Lost Highway. Seriously, last time I watched it, I was like, jeez, look at all those snake plants. Fun facts!

• I’m still using Mattrbld to manage content on this blog. It still works! I like it.

• A long time ago I saw the movie The Tree of Life in the theater when it came out. Didn’t care for it! Thought it was kind of boring. I think I was sleepy. Flash forward a few years here and for various reasons I’ve decided to watch all of Terrence Malick’s films in order. I’ve done Badlands and I’ve done Days of Heaven. Liked ‘em both! My incredibly spicy hot take is that Days of Heaven is probably technically a better movie but I think I liked Badlands more. This probably has something to do with the fact that Badlands involved the use of elaborate Home Alone-style traps whereas Days of Heaven did not.

  • The various reasons here include the fact that for various reasons I have taken a recent interest in 70s movies, and, hey, this guy made some movies in the 70s. It was also a bit (in related reasons) because I’ve been watching some but not all Spielberg movies alongside the Blank Check podcast and one of them was The Sugarland Express and in the episode for that they cited like three or so 70s movies as being similar or related or just of the same ether in the air at the time and Badlands was in that list. One thing leads to another and now I’m watching an entire guy’s filmography, slowly, without any podcast to support me in this journey. Fun.

  • That said I feel like The Thin Red Line is going to hold me up for a while because while I’m okay with splitting long movies up across multiple nights sometimes I feel like maybe I’m going to not want to do it with that one and when on earth am I going to find a night I’m awake long enough to get through all three hours of that in a single sitting? Probably not while I’m at the peak of race training oops. I’m going to do it, I’ve wanted to see it for a while now, but. Yeah.

• After forgetting my coffee that one time and I told my wife about how I get real anxious all the time about maybe did I forget to put my coffee in the trunk that morning on my way to work my wife joked I should take a photo of it every day to calm myself down. So now I’m sending her a photo of my coffee every morning after I put it in the trunk. It’s a wonder she keeps me around.

• I’ve listened to a couple episodes of the The Sixteenth Minute podcast this week and it’s made me feel like I’m just going to be angry about the internet all the time, now.

  • It’s seems like a good show though, based on this episode and this episode.

  • I wish all podcasts worth listening to had their own dedicated websites that looked nice and helped pitch the show better to potential listeners instead of just being garbage looking lists of episodes at some umbrella podcast app website’s garbage site. I am angry about podcast websites (or the lack thereof) all the time. (Hey podcasters: got money? Call me. Give me some money. I’ll make you nice websites.)

• I added a better footer bar to the post pages here that make it at least theoretically slightly easier to respond to these posts in appropriate fashions. I still wish I had it a little more, like, automated, or personalized, or something, but there’s no time and that annoys me.

  • Also as much as I like the design thing I’ve set up on this site I’m also already completely over it and kind of want to throw it out and start over. Annoying.

Finished up week eight with a ten miler today and 33-and-change total for the week. Got absolutely poured on from like mile six through eight today which was fun. Fun because it was like in the 60s outside aka not miserably cold, finally. Spring!

I know folks run more miles than this all the time but still crossing that 30 miles in a week line feels like a real, well, this is real, huh, moment for me. Particular true this week either way two of those runs being pace day runs. Suffice it to say I feel like I’ve earned this week’s Saturday night beverages.

Over the weekend I finally watched The Substance and a few weeks ago I watched Anora and I’m finally here to give you my red-hot 2025 Oscar movie award take which is that while Anora was a fine movie that I liked okay and which I admired more after I learned a bit more about it after listening to the Unspooled episode about it I think that The Substance was a great movie that was a thousand times more interesting and that Demi Moore was robbed, she went full-ass body-horror crone(nbergian)-nightmare for it and it absolutely ruled, five stars.

Just a few things for you today.

• My day-job life involves a lot of code-related work and I’ve always felt a lot of imposter syndrome around it, for as much as I’ve worked at it and enjoy it there’s still that fear that anyone who knows more than me or has been around longer than me is going to see through it to the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing. Now it just feels like anyone whose opinion I may have once valued has since gone on to just hand off whatever they’re doing to a literal impostor in the form of AI code generators. I am shaking my damn head!

• Saw the movie Sinners last night. Hey guess what, that movie that pretty much everybody is telling you rules? It rules. (When it did the one thing I think around the mid-point of the movie, I think, I think I was about ready to fall out of my seat. It was so good.)

• Then we came home and my wife started watching The Pitt and I made it about half an hour into the first episode before I started to feel like I was on the verge of having a minor panic attack and I bounced. Sorry, world! I will not be joining you in the Pitt!

• I’ve listened to a couple episodes of The Gastropod Podcast and it’s fun. I thought this episode about noise levels in restaurants was particularly interesting from a design-y or a user-experience-y perspective. I also liked the admission (spoiler alert) that it maybe doesn’t all matter that much because we’re all just going to go to restaurants or not go to restaurants regardless.

• I try not to post rage bait, I think, but, like, this makes me want to give up and die. What are we doing here, actually.

So, I had this post ready to go about two weeks ago:

—

I’m in week 10 of 12 of my current half-marathon training cycle. This is kind of the biggest week of training; it’s my highest mileage week this cycle, with the most pace-day miles in the mix.

I am feeling…a little creaky? But alright, overall.

The pace runs have made for an interesting experiment. Well, the whole training cycle has been an interesting experiment, actually. It’s a lot of transitions this time out: transitioning from four to five days a week running, from “I’m just training to reach the finish line” to “I’m training to reach the finish line…but faster?”, to generally higher mileage in a shorter stretch of time…

But yeah, the pace runs. I look forward to not doing them anymore while also thinking I’m going to actually miss them when I’m not doing them? I’ve been treating them as experiments in going faster, I’ve set ambitious but apparently reasonable goals for them, while trying to give myself some freedom to play with them a bit, to treat them as experiments in figuring out how to do them, really. I have surprised myself multiple times while also sliding slowly toward a “well I’m not exactly looking forward to those runs” mindset. It’s weird. And yet like last week my plan had none in it and by the end of the week my “relaxed’ pace was naturally going up (due at least in some part to some stress-addled runs, I’m sure, but). I guess it’s gains and also at the same time I’m sure summer weather is going to slide in here any day now and kick some of those seeming gains right back in the teeth.

There are pace runs included in the marathon plan I have slated for when this cycle is done but they won’t be like this. At least, I don’t think they’ll be like this. There’s only ever going to be one a week and I’m under no delusion that the pace I’m trying for for the half is reasonable for the full. So it’ll be interesting to see how those days shake out come the summer. Generally speaking though I think I look forward to both keeping on with the increased mileage and also easing up on what I expect to happen in some of those miles.

It’s also weird this cycle that the long runs have never quite felt long yet. Like it’s only now that I’m getting up to past ten miles on Saturdays that the long run actually feels longer than the longer mid-week run. Shifting the balance back around come summer will be interesting. And maybe make for a few slightly less tired days at the day job.

(I feel like I’m probably repeating things I’ve already said along the way here but that’s fine.)

—

So then the next day I went out and did a nine mile pace run and it felt great. I surprised myself. I was like, gee, I might not enjoy doing these, but I am doing these about as well as I could imagine myself doing them. I’m gonna race this race so hard (for me)!

And then the day after that I went out for my slow run and after about a mile it felt like someone was taking a baseball bat to the insides of my knees.

Whoops.

Now it’s race week and I think I’ve recovered…okay? I skipped my second pace run that week in favor of an extra rest day but then I did make it through my long run that week, and then last week I made it through all my slow paceless miles, and now this week I’ve got extra rest days before and after the mid-week miles before the race on Sunday. I never really thought of this last week or so as a “taper” since it’s still pretty high mileage for me but I think maybe not doing those pace runs is enough at this point to put me in a taper mindset? Like maybe I’m a little taper crazy. Maybe I felt a little crazy on rest day number two yesterday. I don’t know.

I don’t know. I honestly have no idea what’s going to happen when I get out there on Sunday. I feel okay but not perfect, there’s aches but nothing that should stop me from going out there, though they could stop me from going hard out there; still, I suspect I could surprise myself some, but not, like, completely. I can see the value in taking the race just a little more chill than I was maybe training for (with fall marathon training being just a quick turn-around away after this race). But also I don’t want to, like, pretend I didn’t train the way I did, completely. But also I don’t need to break myself over this.

So, who knows! We’ll see what happens. I’m scheduled for a little baby pace run tomorrow morning and we’ll see how I feel after that one I guess.

And of course if literally nothing else just getting to the finish line is still obviously cool as hell and the journey to this one has been an interesting one.

I’ve been … not much in a blogging mood, lately? Or I’ve just been distracted. Or something. I don’t know. But there’s things.

Like. I ran that half marathon a couple weeks ago. And…it went well. Really well. I set a new PR in the half marathon, crushing my old one by like 14 or 15 minutes; which, I mean, okay, my previous bests-of were of the “I am just trying to get to the finish line” variety, and this one was my first real “I want to get to the finish line, sure, but, like, can I do it maybe a little bit fast, for me?” race, and I trained that way for it, and so it wasn’t going to be much of a competition, all things going well, but, like, it still feels good to have basically done what I set out to do.

To go ahead and put some times on it, to put that “fast, for me” bit into context, lest anyone think I mean “fast, like actual fast,” my secret “everything, and I mean, everything goes perfectly” goal was 2:10, and I came in at 2:14:11, pretty squarely in the just-below-the-middle of the pack, I think. And I felt really good the whole time, and I felt like I was having fun the whole run, and I never ticked over into feeling like I couldn’t make it or like I was going to have to stop to walk or like I was actually dead and didn’t know it yet. It was pretty cool. (Understatement.)

Now honestly, and I don’t mean this is a real critical way, what’s funny is I think the one reason, or one of the reasons, I didn’t make 2:10 was just inexperience at trying to do something like that? I probably held back a little too much at the start, and didn’t kick it up until a little bit too late, at least out of some well-placed concern about whatever had happened to my knee two weeks earlier, but also just out of, like, well, just not quite closing that gap in my head yet between “this is what I think I can do” and “this is what I can do,” if that makes any sense. So like in retrospect I feel like I probably could have made that time but also I do not regret not making that time because I kind of know just why I didn’t and it’s fine.

Again, funny: putting things into context: I joke about running a half-marathon in the time in takes other folks to run full marathons, but this time, it actually literally happened that, the winner of the full marathon crossed his finish line less than a minute after I crossed my finish line. Mind-boggling.

The weather was wild. It was set to be cool and overcast for the entire run but race day came and it did stay cool, yes, but the sun came out for basically my entire race, which was really something. (Would have worn my sunglasses!) Then maybe five minutes after I finished the clouds rolled in thick and the wind kicked in up off the lake and I possibly froze to death in the beer area.

After my celebratory beverages (completely worth the freezing wind) I hung out at the finish line for a bit watching folks cross. That’s always fun. This was maybe the most at a race that I saw people coming in from the full around the three hour mark and hoo boy as much as I do genuinely love running and pushing myself and all that I will never be as serious about it as those folks; wowee.

Seeing a 77 year old man finishing a half-marathon was awesome. (At least I think it was the half.) I, uh, don’t need to be the folks finishing the marathon in three hours, to say the least—again, I’m serious but not that serious!—but I do absolutely genuinely want to be that guy when I grow up, fates and knees be willing.

And then I took the train home and I spent a couple days drinking more beers than I usually get to and watching a lot of Star Trek and I didn’t run for a week and it was great.

After a somewhat abbreviated recovery window, I’m starting training for the Ann Arbor Marathon in October. Marathon number two, here we go? All things going well? I’m hoping the quick turn-around time isn’t immediately going to bite me in the butt; I’m feeling a little banged up still but I’m hoping just dropping off the faster pace runs I was going after for the half will help continue to calm things down.

It took a little bit to land on this one. I’d thought about going after the Towpath Marathon, but that felt way too soon, and I’d thought about doing the Columbus Marathon again, which would be fun but I kind of don’t want to just repeat the same race and also I have a concert I’m very excited about two days after, and I’m not sure I’m going to want to be standing that long that soon after the finish line. The Ann Arbor race feels like the next best bet, so I’m going to give it a go.

I’m planning on using the Higdon Intermediate 1 plan this time, without worrying too much about those pace runs. Mostly I’ll run for mileage, and if I’m feeling okay I’ll try to open it up a bit on those days, but also I’m not going to sweat it too much, because I know I’m going to be sweating all of it too much, getting back into summer training mode. It’s been a shockingly mild spring into summer here but I’ve started to get some hints of the coming humidity over the last week, which I am both very much looking forward to more of and also know it greatly affects the runs in it.

My goal this time out is right now to just break five hours. I came in 5:18 last fall and I think just by focusing on endurance and being able to keep up a keepable pace for the duration of the race that should be the right stretch this time out.

And, uh, yeah! That’s the plan! Which is obviously as I well know by now all subject to change at a moment’s notice. But I’m looking forward to getting back out there after doing this really crazy thing for a second time…

I’ve abused the hell out of the points on my credit card over the last couple years and after finally cashing them all in I’ve got what amounts to a free Mac Mini sitting on the desk in front of me right now. It’s so cute. It’s so…tiny.

I’m spoiled by my job, where I’ve got a really very good MacBook Pro, on which I can accomplish pretty much anything I need to, but there’s always a few things you kind of just want on your own dedicated device? Namely, in my case, having a place to house my Lightroom catalog. Which, now, I do. Here’s to hopefully actually making more use of my camera knowing now I have a little box on my desk that I can just plug my cards into and actually upload pictures to, more often than once a year or so.

This is my first real personal computer in a while, which is funny to admit, having grown up with personal computers basically my entire life; there was always an upgrade waiting around the corner, always a moment when I was moving on to my next best machine ever. (More or less. Sort of.) And I know it’s not like there’s anything I couldn’t have been doing all along here but it is nice to have my own little box again that I can definitely absolutely no matter what do anything I want with.

I’m realizing it’s been too long since I’ve done as much for fun with a computer as I’d like to be doing; various reasons, time flies, distractions, so forth, so on. I also miss it and I’m hoping to get some new things going again. I’d like to be learning more than I feel like I have been lately. I dunno.

And, uh, like that, I’m into week four of my current marathon training cycle. Not a ton to say yet. It’s been pretty sticky out there so that’s fun to get used to again. I had my first “down” week last week and this week feels like my first real “up” week with two of my non-long runs going up from 5 to 6 miles each and my Saturday run going up to 11; I’ll hit 29 miles this week, 30 next week. I’m both questioning the decision to bump up the training this time and also relishing the chance to try to see it through. There’s been a lot to be anxious about lately and as much as I don’t want to get out of bed at 5 am some of these days I also don’t want to completely skip the one thing that’s relatively certain to help me tame my anxiety, so.

I’ve also, in an act of almost unprecedented foresight, officially booked my marathon entry and my hotel stay in Ann Arbor. Which means I managed to snag a room in the hotel that’s “steps away from” the start line. It might not seem like much but gosh I won’t mind being able to cross the finish line and then have the option of immediately collapsing onto the hotel room couch for the rest of the day. It’s like a little special gift to future, achy me…

A Friday night treat: finally sharing my analog running log from the first half of the year.

After keeping last year’s entire year on a single (Field Notes) spread, I decided to give myself a little more room to breathe by splitting the year in half across two spreads. A little more room to annotate running plans and other detail and also it’s fun to drop in those extra tenths of miles too when they come. It’s fun.

Through week seven of training. Things are going…okay?

My long run yesterday was my first longer-than-a-half-marathon run since the full marathon last October and it wasn’t ideal; I woke up early to beat the heat only to find it was pouring rain outside, so I went back to bed for a while after looking at the weather and confirming that even though it was going to be hot and humid when I did go out that at least it would be overcast, only for it to eventually be very much not overcast. Made it to nine miles before the heat got the best of me, at which point I started to run/walk the rest of way. Which I know is a fine and perfectly valid form of training and it got me up to the planned mileage for the day but however much I know it’s fine it still never quite feels fine until I can get back out there and give it another go.

The good news is, as much as one can trust the forecast at least, that next weekend’s 15 miler should be under much better conditions, so hopefully that’ll put the nail in the coffin of the off vibes yesterday left behind. Because otherwise things do seem to be going okay, I’m keeping up with the weekly training and I’m feeling pretty good overall, at least when I’m not trying to plug away at miles under glaring sun and within ten thousand percent humidity….

Just testing. Again.

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I think I’ve got images working on here again so now I can share very important updates like how I’m slowly learning how to crochet? Let’s see if this works…

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Went up to Traverse City, Michigan for a family vacation last week. While we were there we visited the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Park. It did not suck.

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Yesterday I wrapped up not only my highest mileage week ever (44 miles) but also my highest mileage two-week span ever (85 miles) with a really nice-feeling 18 mile run.

And…I am tired!

From a certain perspective, this two-week stretch was the peak of this training cycle. In the next month, I’ve got two 43 mile weeks scheduled, each capped with a 20 mile run, but they’re separated by much lighter down weeks. (I mean, sure, tell Darby a year ago that his 35 mile weeks would be down weeks, and, well.) Also, unlike the last couple weeks, where I’ve been running 8 miles twice during the week, I’ll only have one 8 miler each of these last four weeks before the taper. What am I going to do with those freed-up minutes once a week…?

I mean, to be clear, there is still a lot of mileage ahead of me, but after these last two weeks…I am absolutely not going to say I feel like I can coast through this next month, but I’m feeling way less stressed about what’s ahead. If that makes any sense.

Also to say this is all another way of saying that week seven bad run definitely feels like a blip that’s long since dead and buried. In a way it might have been a blessing in disguise, a way of reminding me that, yeah, I gotta worry about getting out early and talking advantage of the best weather of the day and also getting my fueling and “chunking” strategies back in play, all that stuff I was kind of brushing off a little because, like, I’ve done this before, right? Sure, but.

Anyways, looking ahead, no, definitely not coasting yet, but, I do have a sort of more honest confidence than I think I might have had a month or so ago. I could tell yesterday how the increased training I’ve been putting in over this year has been worth it. Sure I was tired and had some aches by the end of the run but my sheer endurance level is just…up, compared to how I remember feeling by the end of some of these longer runs last year.

I really do want to nail those 20 mile runs; my goal at this point is still just to run the whole distance and I’m glad I’ve got two cracks at that on the schedule this time but after how well yesterday’s run went I’m feeling like I’ll be well-primed to knock them both off without too much concern or trouble.

And…hard to believe, but, then, it’ll be taper time. (Oh, the taper crazies are going to bite for real this year, aren’t they?)

Another two weeks down, ending in my first of two twenty mile runs this cycle. Couple noteworthy things about this one:

• First time I’ve run the full 20 mile distance, no walk breaks. Okay, so, I’ve only run 20 miles twice before this—one training run and one marathon run last year, but. I knew I struggled a bit more past, like, 16, 17 miles last year? Was about when my walking breaks usually started kicking in? I think? The difference I feel this year is kind of astounding. Whether it’s just having been through it all once before or because of the jump from four days to five each week of running or the extra level of training I did for the half in the spring…it’s paying off. I feel…strong.

• Okay, caveat, I did stop once in this run, a bit after the eight mile mark. But that was because I was trying a new gel/packet and I didn’t quite have the hang of it when I used it and, like, okay, maybe I found myself wondering for a bit if I was going to literally asphyxiate and die on the side of a dark road this morning? I took a 30 second pause to make sure I was okay. Yeah. Marathon training isn’t all glamorous!

• All that said this was the freakin’ moonshot of runs: I woke up at 4 am, which is a truly ridiculous time to do anything, and then I ran my twenty miles, and managed to land the timing absolutely perfectly so that I could stroll directly up to my kids’ soccer games this morning with enough time to grab a brunch burrito from the food truck on the way. Eat your heart out, NASA!

• That that said, this was a faster than intended run. But what I learned from it is that I can keep a good pace for that long and if I can do that again come race day I’ve got a real good shot at my soft goal of breaking five hours this time out. Obviously anything can happen in those last six miles and there’s no guarantees but it at least seems…plausible?

• That that that said, I’m planning on making my next 20 miler a real slow one. It’ll be the one that leads right into the taper and I don’t want to overdo that one like I kind of sort of maybe felt like I overdid today. (Did I though? I don’t know. It really did feel good. It really did feel like I could have kept going. I don’t know.)

I’m on that weird knife edge right now of for as much as I’m looking forward to getting through the race and taking a break—not waking up at five am for a while sounds real nice right now—I’m also, like, pre-sad at the thought of losing this peak, when the time does come. Obviously running comes and goes in cycles (the way I’m doing it) and I’ll get back up here again (if I choose to) but this whole training cycle has come at a real good time, by which I mean a real bad time, by which I mean running is certainly not therapy but it has been the thing that has actually rewarded me sinking my energy and focus into it during a time of uncertainty and upheaval (personal and global). I look forward to taking a break but I don’t look forward to not running, if that makes sense.

Here’s a photo I took sometime last year.

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Finished off the build/peak training block of this training cycle yesterday with my second twenty miler. After the previous one, my goal this time out was to try to slow things down a bit, and I did successfully do that…by about six minutes. It’s not much but it’s something.

Adjusting my pace on these longer runs has been interesting because it feels like I’m torn between the mental impulse to run slower—to run a pace I think I should be running, based on potentially realistically outdated information—and the physical reality of my body having evolved and changed in what it can take of what I’ve been throwing at it over the last year. On the one hand it’s possible I should actually be forcing the issue and making myself go slower than I actually am, on the other hand it’s also possible that I actually am doing the slower runs I should be doing in preparation for a faster race pace than I realistically believe I can maintain.

To put it another way: I see what Coros and Strava are predicting I could do during the race, while I’m still aiming for less ambitious goals based on past performance, and I’m not quite sure how much of that gap to close—which of us is more wrong, me listening to my body or my apps listening to my stats? How much am I prepared mentally to push physically past what I think I can do to reach something that is actually possible even if I don’t exactly believe it myself?

To put all of these an even more explicit and reductive way: I’ve gone into this training with the loose goal of just breaking five hours this time out. I was up near five-thirty last time around and so that alone is an absolutely huge gain and if I just come in at 4:59:59 I can justifiably celebrate for months after this race is done. And the good news is based on the pace I’ve held on these long runs, if all goes well during the actual race, if I can run basically just like I did on these long runs, reaching that goal at this point should be no problem. But now I am wondering how much past that goal I can go—if I commit to it and if I run smart and if I don’t hold myself back more than is wise and that I absolutely need to, what else is possible?

Of course some of the key words there are “if all goes well.” I ran down on the Towpath yesterday—ten miles straight out to the south, ten miles back the other way!—and you can absolutely see on my heart rate charts where the sun popped up over the tree line and really started to warm things up on the run. I was actually sort of hoping something like that would happen as a bit of a personal test; I’ve been doing most of my running in the dark of the morning because of scheduling and what not—my last 20 miler started at 4:30 and even when the sun did rise the day was rather overcast so it never became an active concern—and so yesterday’s run was scheduled as much to give myself some freedom to run slower without the pressure of needing to be somewhere at the end of it but also with the thought that if the sun did come out it would give me both the pleasure of running in actual daylight and also the reality check of confirming I can still run in the bright light. And the good news is I made it fine, as much as I definitely felt that sun increasing the challenge run down the back half. Now what I don’t know is how much of those six extra minutes are attributable to me consciously trying to go slower versus just the reality of going slower because of external conditions.

Either way, it’s impossible not to take some pride in what I’ve accomplished this time around, whatever comes on race day. The switch to five days a week of running, the elevated mileage during the full marathon training cycle, the accomplishment at the half marathon in the spring and the recoveries I got through in leading up to that: it’s been a banner year. And of course it’s not over yet, as much as I’m looking forward to taking that break one I get through this race.

And of course now it’s taper time and all the particular challenge that represents. Not that this next week will feel like it much—I imagine going back in time to tell couch-to-5k Darby that someday a 32 mile week would be a “down” week and how that news would drop. But then of course it just keeps dropping from there until race day and we see what we see.

Extremely belated update. Extremely current proof of life.

I ran another marathon in October. I’m a darn tootin’ two-timer now.

The weather worked out pretty swell, with the expected sun holding off behind some clouds until well past when it was forecasted to come out, so it wasn’t until sometime in the back half of the race that became a real factor. I made it a new personal-best consecutive 21 miles before I had to start working in walk breaks. Even then I still came in pretty much right about where I expected to, which is great. (I’ll admit to having hoped I could have kept that run pace going all the way through to the end, in which event I would have demolished my goal; that said, I am more than happy with slicing about 16 minutes off last year’s time.)

I sincerely hadn’t realized just how much just doing this again was going to mean to me until after I crossed the finish line, and then I was walking around in the finishers’ area trying to figure out what food I was allowed to grab, and then I realized I’d done it again, and I think I got a little loopy, a little emotional. It was a good feeling. And then I had a beer and that was cool.

Since then it’s been the usual post-race malarkey: took two weeks off, tried to get back going and got sick so took a third week off, now I’m about three weeks back into things and my mileage is irregular and low and I miss the consistency and solid vibes that went along with the higher mileage part of training but also I do like sleeping and not running when it’s raining out so it’s okay. I’m trying to get back up to a (newly high for me) baseline of 20–25 miles a week over the winter and I’m not there quite yet and that’s okay because I’ve got time to get there, knowing as I do now that I am absolutely not going after the Cleveland Marathon in the spring, which would necessitate starting a training regimen on New Year’s Day, basically, which I don’t want to mess with right now; I’ll tentatively, probably, go for the half again, and the later training start that affords me.

And then…next fall?…