Typically, in one of my first posts of the year, I am eager to recount the past year and to rehash the travails of training and racing. It is always so illuminating to look back on everything and attempt to find clarity that may have been hard to come by in the heat of the moment. 

As was the case for 2020, though, 2021 was pretty different, pretty abnormal, thanks to COVID continuing to upend everything. Whereas there really wasn’t hardly any in-person racing to be had in 2020, its return in 2021, following mass vaccination and booster efforts for adults and kids aged 5+ (HOORAY!), was much-welcomed and symbolized that maybe, just maybe, we were sauntering our way back toward normalcy. Nevertheless, so much continued to be out of the ordinary. The end of 2021 felt and looked more normal than the end of ’20, for sure, but life has continued to be pretty extraordinarily different than pre-pandemic “normal.”  

In terms of my running, 2020 brought with it more mileage, more elevation, and more total training hours for me than I’ve ever posted, and this was all in the absence of any in-person racing. 2021 carried a slight decrease in mileage and training hours but an increase in elevation – 2570.17 miles, 426:03:35 training time, and 186,247 feet, if numbers are your game. I kept it super local this year, again, with almost all of my ’21 mileage local to SJ (and an overwhelming majority in my local ZIP code and adjacent ones), save for the week I was in the midwest earlier in the summer and the week I was in Cancun at the end of the year. 

I finally ran my first in-person race around July 4th, at a local parkrun, and followed it with two more in-person races for which I targeted my training from the summer onward, a “35k” in October and then a 50k at Mt. Tam in early November. 

Following the 50k, I finally broke my year-plus running streak, in the interest of adequate rest and recovery; not posting 200+ mile months or 8-10+ hour training weeks was a welcome change in November and December.  

While I wasn’t chasing PRs or racing out of my ever-loving mind in 2021, my daily (or almost daily) relationship with running remained important since I run for all the reasons that many people choose to run (and then some). With stress and anxiety and life continuing to feel pretty heavy throughout most of 2021, while most of us felt like we were languishing our days away, running helped me feel like I was doing an okay-enough job most days and left me feeling like I could give each day, each experience I had, the best I had to give. It was both a literal and figurative breath of fresh air each and every day. 

But when I think about my year of running in 2021, more than the 50k race, more than training for a fast track mile in the winter/spring with J under Coach Lisa’s tutelage, and more than all the time I spent climbing hills in ARP or any of my other running pursuits I realized (or failed to realize) in the past year, I think about losing John, my dear friend and training partner from Chicago. 

His death in late March rocked my world, and while now, nearly ten months later, I can acknowledge all the stages of grief I’ve cycled through and thought I was past, a big part of me still can’t shake the notion that he’s gone. I’ve left his obit tab open on my phone for the past almost-year and still somewhat regularly re-read it in disbelief, I guess thinking that maybe one day I’ll finally read that it was just a big misunderstanding and that he’s actually alive and well and fine in Chicago; he just hasn’t texted our group of friends in a while because he has been swamped.

With all the death and destruction the pandemic has brought to so many people all over the world, it seems pretty easy to ascertain that many of us have thought more (frequently, vividly) about the sanctity and brevity of life lately, perhaps more than we ever have before. John’s death (not from COVID)  – despite his superior health, consistent exercise routine, balanced diet, lack of alcohol/drug usage, regular physicals, health screenings, healthy weight, and the like – brought these notions to the forefront for me. If someone like John can suddenly drop dead at any given time, it’s hard not to feel like we’re all goners. 

It’s similar to how I felt after I had a stroke three years ago, at age 35, and luckily walked away from. It’s helplessness, anger, betrayal, and for my personal experience at least, gratitude over what could have been, all balled up into one big cluster. 

This time around, in 2021, it made for a lot of solo runs wherein I feebly tried to make sense of John’s death, as well as a lot of texting with Stacey, in the hopes that somehow, we’d be able to get to the bottom of it and that we’d eventually learn that John, in fact, hadn’t gone anywhere. 

It’s here where running’s attractiveness becomes so apparent. When coupled with some very complicated and mixed emotions – like the aforementioned, related to the grieving process – the simplicity of running can’t be beat. 

One foot in front of the other, over and over, repeatedly, in a general forward motion, as long as or as far as you care to go. 

On a treadmill, up a big-ass hill, around a local track, through your block on the sidewalk: environment doesn’t matter as much as pace, and forward is a pace.

I think that’s the best we can all do right now: try to move forward every single day. Literally, figuratively, both, whatever you can.

Though tomorrow may not look exactly like today, and today might not at all resemble yesterday; last week, month, year; or even years prior, relentless forward progress is the name of the game.

What is strange to me, as someone who is very ENTJ and who very much enjoys going to town on mapping out a year’s worth of goals ahead of time, is that yet another year has begun, and I am a fairly-clean-for-me slate as to what’s on the horizon. It’s very much a consequence of the pandemic.

I registered for some of my favorite local in-person races this year – SIB 10k in mid-March, Silicon Valley half in late April – and have a couple deferrals that I’ll probably cash in this year – MTB full in late May and CIM in early December – but beyond that, I have no idea. Whether I’ll do any of the aforementioned remains to be seen, too.

Usually I dig registering for races and going all-in on training to try to post a PR and have a successful race; it’s hard to know what will feel right in the coming months. Any anchor of certainty feels as though it has been shaken. I know many can relate.

My hope is that my running will be social this year than last or the year before, with in-person racing and training runs with big groups of buddies feeling more like a given, as it was pre-pandemic, than a luxury. The few times I was with other groups of people on the run last year, at a race or on a fun training run, made it abundantly clear how much I’ve missed that experience lately.

That, combined with John’s death last year, has made me value even more than usual the precious time I get to spend doing something I love with people whom I hold dear. 

I wish you and yours well for the new year. 

xoxo