RunBlog

The Do-Over Marathon Chicago Marathon 2007 Cape Cod Marathon 2007 After the 2006 Boston Marathon, I knew my body needed a break. I lowered my mileage and ran without a plan. I had pushed myself hard for a year from April 2005. Enough for a while. In the fall of 2006, two noteworthy running events occurred. One was the first meeting of the Greater Norwood Running Club on October 1. I wasn’t there (business trip), but I found the notes from that original meeting on my computer many years later. The backstory on GNRC is that Mike grew unhappy with HFC, the club he and I belonged to at the time. HFC (which stands for Hurtin’ For Certain) is a group of former collegiate runners that ran from the Xaverian Brothers High School track. Mike and I would join them there. Our friend Mel C. also joined. At some point, something about HFC riled Mike. As I recall it related to Mel being passed over for an award. That disaffection turned into him starting a new club. I just followed Mike from one

 Med Tent Jeff Maine Marathon 2005 Looking back at my training log between the Boston Marathon in April 2005 and the Maine Marathon in October, it seems that my plan was to do two speed workouts per week, plus a long run, plus some easy runs. I say “it seems” because I have no recollection of what was on my mind at that point. I just remember having my terrible Boston finishing time in the pit of my stomach, plus the shame of having to repeat my sad story of defeat over and over again. Both of these urged me to push harder. Mike and I got in the habit of doing hill repeats on the road to the top of nearby Blue Hill. He and I were both training for Maine. On September 8, I did a tempo run with Mel C. from St. Tim’s in Norwood. At the end of the run, I felt like I couldn’t catch my breath, and that feeling wasn’t going away. After a few minutes, I figured out that the problem was that my heart rate was elevated and it wasn’t coming down. Mel drove me to Norwood Hospital and staye

Crash and Burn I ran my first road race in 2001 at age 35, stepping in for a friend who decided not to run. It was a 5K. At that point I was running regularly, but just a few miles on my own a few times a week. My motivation was not complicated--I was sick of being out of shape, and running was the most convenient cure. Then I started running on Saturdays with Fr. Culloty and a new guy named Mike. We’d do 3 miles or so and would talk along the way. (Fr. Culloty used to try out bits from his upcoming homilies.) The notion of talking while running was new to me. I remember it being odd from both a pacing perspective and a social perspective. I wasn’t used to running at a conversational pace, and I wasn’t used to the cadence of conversation amongst runners, which, as I learned, comes in bursts.  Mike and I expanded our running from weekends to weekday mornings. Then we expanded to track workouts. Mike was already a marathoner, and his chatter about running them, along with regular encou