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2021: the annual report

2021: the annual report

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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. 

first of many TQ and ARP runs in ’21 (PC: J)

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.  

from the 50k

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. 

rest in peace. (Chicago, summer ’19, our last run together)
Boston ’10 with John and Stacey

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

Signs

Signs

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Running is so weird. Last week I wrote about how I bailed on my cutback 16-mile LR because I just felt sub-meh, so instead of grinding through it, I ran for less than an hour before coming home and getting some additional rest. I felt like I was making the right decision, given the bodily feedback I had, but admittedly, it’s still hard sometimes when my head and heart are pulling me in different directions. 

Well, after that bailed long run, on Sunday I ran the longest and farthest of this training cycle, and it felt better than I hoped it would. I figured I’d run about 26-27, maybe around 5-6 hours, and that’s pretty much exactly how it ended up: 26.5, 5:39, and just under 5,000’ of climbing. My goal was less as fast as possible and more along the lines of time on feet and dial-in the fueling for race day. I’m pretty happy with how it went, overall, and how I felt. 

It was a weird beginning though, for sure, and something that I keep revisiting. I’ve found myself thinking about John a lot more recently, rest in peace. My guess is that it stems from last week’s Chicago Marathon because more often than not, he ran it (and Stacey would jump in for a bit), and we’d all text and email after the fact and celebrate the victories and bitch about the heartaches and/or the weather. 

In the off-chance that he didn’t run it, John always offered colorful commentary about his observations of the race after the fact, mutual friends whom he saw (or didn’t see, curiously), that sort of thing. These text or email exchanges were a given every second Sunday in October.

It was weird to have a Chicago Marathon weekend come and go and not hear from him. 

rest in peace. (Chicago, summer ’19)

Anyway. As it is for a lot of people, for me, sometimes the hardest part of any given run is the first couple miles or, before that, simply getting out the door in the first place. I didn’t start my long LR on Sunday until dawn, around 6:45, so I wouldn’t have to wear a headlamp unnecessarily for hours. In the first 20 or so minutes, I was cycling through periodic mental soliloquies, wondering why I was doing this in the first place, thinking of all the other things I could be doing at that moment, trying to remember why I thought doing a 50k again was a good idea … typical beginning-of-LR mental banter when I’m by myself.

And then: BOOM. Shortly after I began running, the most brilliantly colored sky stopped me in my tracks. By myself, in the pre-dawn Sunday morning, I involuntarily let out an audible ohmygod for no one to hear but me. The colors were so unusual and so unlike what I see at this time of year that seeing them where and when I did stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn’t stop to take a picture because I just wanted to experience it, myself, right then and there. 

I haven’t been running in the early mornings much anymore, save for the weekends, so maybe that affected my visceral response. Maybe the pre-dawn/blue hour skies are always that color at this time of year, and I just haven’t seen it lately to notice. The best I could remember, though, was that that type of sky — filled with those types of hues — is something that I usually don’t see until the early morning runs in the winter. (It’s part of the reason why winter running is always my fav season, even when I lived in Chicago). 

Left to my own devices — and responsible for getting myself through the next five-or-so hours of running and climbing — I decided that this brilliant sky was an auspicious beginning to this run, the same run for which not all that long ago I was feeling a bit of trepidation.

Hell, maybe this sunrise was even a sign from John that this run would be fine, that I got this. 

I realize that thinking that John was “sending” me a message from “the other side” sounds a bit crunchy, even for me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. So fast, within the first 20 minutes of my run, before I began the hard-hard work, my emotions catapulted from trepidation/gritting-teeth realism to thinking that I got this, it’s fine, it’s nothing I haven’t done before. The transition was quick and breathtakingly dramatic. 

And then. Right as I was about to enter the park, after twenty minutes of chiding myself for thinking that John somehow sent me a brilliant, seemingly-rare sunrise, I noticed a sleek fox bolting out of someone’s yard and quickly trying to hide away in the woods.

It’s rare for me to see foxes at or near the park — in the almost-eight years I’ve been running there, I can probably count on one hand how many I’ve seen — and it got me thinking about John, again. Foxes no doubt are in the park and in the surrounding area, living right under our noses, but most of the time, we don’t see them; that’s how they survive, by flying under the radar more often than not.     

John was that type of friend to a lot of people. You always knew he was there, that he was around, but a lot of the time, he chose to fly under the radar. He never wanted attention on himself. The thought of anyone lavishing praise or attention on him for anything, no matter how noble or amazing or great his accomplishment was, would make him cringe. (This even came up in his funeral service). 

Maybe it’s weird to proclaim that an unseasonable, brilliantly-colored sunrise and then an elusive, almost-invisible fox in a twenty-minute timeframe, at the outset of a killer long run — one that I felt uneasy about from the get-go — made me think of my deceased friend and training partner, whom I miss dearly, but it did. 

For the next five hours and change, my thoughts kept returning to our friendship that spanned over a decade-plus. 

Even when the run got hard, or I got tired, or whatever, the momentary challenges were eclipsed by a sense of gratitude and calm, a feeling of genuine happiness to be out there and doing what I was doing. 

Not going to lie: it was amazing. It was a run that I’ll definitely bottle. 

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