The last couple days it has been difficult to not question my physical, mental, and spiritual preparation and race-day execution. I am my harshest critic, but there comes a point when I have to stop dissecting and let go. It has been tough to let go, but now that I have had a chance to reflect back on the race and learn from my mistakes it is time to move on and look toward the future.

For the first three days after the marathon I will do some light jogging to get the soreness and other “junk” out of my legs then I will take a two week break from running. When I was out jogging in Central Park the day after the marathon I already began to turn my attention towards the spring marathon. I will approach my spring marathon with a little different mentality and my coach and I will make a few tweaks in our training program. I learned a lot from this race, and they weren’t all negative. One of the positive things I took away is that I can rally even when I am not having my greatest day.

When I was a little kid watching the Olympics on TV I always wondered what it took to be an Olympian. Now that I am one I know that one of the biggest characteristics that it takes is resilience. It is not never failing that measures greatness it’s about how many times one can get knocked down and keep getting back up. One of my favorite verses in the Bible says, “Though a righteous man falls seven times, he rises again.” I have fallen many, many times throughout my career and I haven’t always been able to pop back up right away but somehow, through the grace of God, I have found a way to get back up. That’s where I am now, stumbling back onto my feet.

As I write I am flying to Nashville, TN to go to the Nissan headquarters. I am excited about the opportunity to connect with the employees that have invested in the pursuit of a healthier, more active America. Then its off to a speaking engagement at a charity function before traveling back home for a day, picking up the dogs, and heading back out on the road for a couple more weeks of travel to various other functions. I am glad to have some things to keep me excited and moving forward. If I can encourage you with a good word it is this: get back up, even if you have been down for awhile, and keep going at it. I am sure you won’t regret that you did.

After doing some light stretching and eating my typical pre-race nut butter sandwich and Cytomax protein shake I headed down to catch the elite athlete bus that would bus us to the staging area on Staten Island. The bus ride was the quiet before the storm. It was quite a spectacle arriving at Staten Island with the masses pushing towards the race start. The enormity of the race I was about to partake in was setting in.

An hour before the start my teammate Meb and I headed out for a 15-minute warm-up jog. Our spirits were high and our conversation was casual as we shared a few laughs. We knew what lied ahead and that the best way to prepare for what we were about to put our bodies through was to be as relaxed as possible.

The cannon fired at 9:40 catching us all off guard and we were off, heading up the steepest incline in the race over the first mile. During the first mile everyone is checking out everyone else trying to decide how to work the opening stages of the race. The pace was slow so we had many runners in our lead group. A Moroccan runner was out front surging back and forth as I checked on my teammates Meb and Dan to see where they were in the field.

My plan was to wait through the opening miles of the race and then make sure the pace was honest. After a slow opening mile we had picked it up significantly and were starting to run some sub 5-minute miles. I was hoping for a fast early pace and I was getting my wish. Although we weren’t running very even splits the pace felt fast enough to me, especially considering the pestering wind that seemed to always be in our face no matter which way we were running.

The first half of the marathon is usually fairly insignificant. It just sets up the second half of the race. My goal is to always come through an easy as possible. I had taken a few short stints at the front but was trying to conserve energy by staying at the back of the pack. This was one of my big mistakes.

The back of the pack is only a good place to sit if you are either supremely confident or feeling really good because it is the easiest place to fall off from. When guys make moves off the front it is very difficult to react off the back of the pack because you are already a couple strides behind. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to catch up.

As 1st Ave approached we all knew what was about to hit us: big crowds and a big surge. I relaxed as much as I could coming off the bridge in anticipation. My plan was to cover the surge to an extent using the next couple of miles to catch back up if the leaders were going to run a ridiculously fast mile split going down 1st Ave. As it turned out the leaders didn’t run too crazy of a mile and I should have just covered it. Instead I let a gap form and was beginning to struggle to make up the difference.

I watched our group of 10 get strong out over the next couple of miles and the leaders began to pull away. At that point I was going through a bit of a rough patch and was doing my best to try and stay mentally positive, running my own race. The undulating course was taking its toll on my body as I pounded towards the Bronx.

Over the last 10k I made it my goal to let out whatever was inside of me. I had trained very hard for this moment. Too hard to let it completely slip by despite not having the run I had hoped for. This is when the battle becomes about personally overcoming your own body and not giving in to the desire to completely fold when the chips are down.

I worked my way from 10th after 1st Ave up to fourth by the time I reached the park. At mile 25 I was hurting. Despite my pain I was curious how my teammate Meb was doing up with the leaders but had no way of knowing until someone from the crowd yelled to me that Meb was going to win. I smiled. It had been a long road for Meb. He deserved to win after the many ups and downs he had endured during his career. He is a great guy that has been like a brother to me and taught me so much about the marathon. He has shown me what the heart of a champion is like through the good and bad.

I was glad to be done when I crossed the finish line. It had been a tough day for me. Certainly not my finest day but I had finished the journey the best I could and certainly learned many lessons on the road. When I finished is when the disappointment began to set in. I had high hopes for this race and higher hopes that my fitness was much better than what I showed this day. However, even though the journey of this day was over I live to see another day and another opportunity.

As we were finishing our repeats on Tuesday it began to snow, and snow, and snow. We ended up getting so much snow that the ski resort reported a 30” dump and that they had enough to open a month earlier than expected. On Tuesday night I went over to my training partners house, Josh Cox, for a pre-birthday healthy homemade pizza dinner. Driving home I felt lucky to be in my four-wheel drive equipped Titan because there was no way I was getting home any other way.

I turned 27 years old on Wednesday. Birthdays have definitely changed over the years and especially since I began marathoning. I used to have stay up all-night parties with my buddies in grade school now I am eating Splenda pumpkin pie, which is really good, and enjoying low-key moments with teammates and friends. This year Sara wanted to throw a big party for me but when I am in the middle of heavy training it is hard to find extra energy for even fun things like parties.

Friday was my biggest workout of the week, an 18-mile tempo run. I had already done an 18-mile tempo two weeks prior and it had gone well but with how good my body was feeling I knew I could run much faster this time around. Luckily the snow had subsided and it was almost a no-shirt day (a runners way of relating temperature). I ended up running two minutes faster than I had previously run. When I finished that run I knew, with all certainty that I was ready. It was not that I didn’t know before but there are those moments when you no longer have to talk yourself into the fact that you are ready you just know because the evidence is undeniable.

I was expecting to feel pretty trashed on Saturday but I was surprised, once again, when I felt unusually bouncy on my training runs. Another good sign. Running good workouts is important but how you come off them is almost equally important. In training, no single run should ever be looked at in isolation. It’s about the whole block of training. This why some people can hop in someone else’s workout, run it and apparently be in the same shape but then finish minutes behind on race day. It isn’t totally about what has been done on just one day it is about what has been done over the weeks and months leading up to the event. Coming off the workout well is just as important as doing the workout. Here is how I come off workouts well.

The first thing I do after a workout is eat. Recovery begins with nutrition. I have Cytomax protein and a banana right away, and then I go home and stretch and eat lunch soon thereafter. After lunch I go straight into a 90-minute massage. I know massage might not be accessible to everyone, which is why when I don’t have access to a massage I use various balls, rollers, Normatec MVP, ect to workout any knots or tight spots I may have acquired from the workout. After the massage I go straight into my Icool for an ice bath. After relaxing for a couple of hours it is time to go to gym for some light leg weights (quad extensions, pulley exercises, ect…the key here is to strengthen the muscles that tend to be weak on you specifically), a kick in the pool for hydro-therapy and a brief (10 minutes tops, followed by lots of water) stretch in the hot tub. These are the keys I have found helpful in coming off workouts well but you are going to have to experiment to find what works well for you.

Sunday marked two weeks till race day. It was my last long run. I ran 2 ½ hours and covered well over 20 miles feeling very controlled the whole way. It is at about two weeks before the race that I make sure to really monitor my effort level. I still do some hard running but there are no tests until the marathon. I did my usually recovery routine in the afternoon and finished the day with a night service at church.

Today I woke up and had that unusual pop in my legs once again. I was thinking about how I only had a couple weeks left to enjoy the fitness that I have gained over the last four months, and then it will be time to stop running and let my body recover. People are always surprised when I tell them I let myself get out of shape over a two-week complete no-run recovery period after all my marathons. I have come to see it as a very necessary part of marathon training. I have tried only taking a modified break and found that I came back in very good shape but then as I began my training my body goes stale, begins to breakdown in the form of injuries, and I see very little improvement. Recovery is a necessary part of the cycle of a marathon runner. Plus, if you never let yourself get out of shape its harder to appreciate being in shape.

I locked my Titan and headed out for my typical 20-minute warm-up jog along this beautiful little single track that runs along Lower Rock Creek. I came back and, uncharacteristically for me, hopped right in the truck to drive the 2.5 miles up the road where I would start my climb. I usually take a few minutes to stretch before getting in the car but today for some reason I didn’t feel the need. I pulled onto the highway about 200 meters in front of a sport utility vehicle and we started to drive up to the base of the climb.

As we were driving I glanced back in my rear view mirror and what I saw was like something out of a movie. The car, for no apparent reason, swerved into the far right hand shoulder and then headed all the way back across the four lane highway into the left hand shoulder where it rolled in a cloud of dust and came to a stop. My heart missed a couple of beats and didn’t know what to do. My mind flashed back to a psychology class I had taken at Stanford where we learned about how when emergencies happen in public places where there are lots of people who could act people usually didn’t because they all figured someone else would. I was not going to be that person. I pulled off on the shoulder and we immediately called 911 and talked to the dispatcher for a few minutes. Before we got off the phone a fire truck that happened to be driving by was already on the scene with its lights on. We figured at that point there was very little we could do by running back to the scene, as not only the fire truck was there but various cars had pulled over as well.

I was pretty shaken up as we continued on our way and Sara dropped me off to start my run. My thoughts were with the person in that car and I was imaging what could have happened to us. What went wrong with their car? Did they make it? What if I had jogged the warm-up 20 seconds slower and had been driving next to that car when it started swerving? What if I had taken some more time to stretch? That could have been us. I started the climb with a very different perspective than I started the warm-up. Running didn’t seem any less significant, it felt more precious. Life felt more precious.

Perspective is a huge part of running. It’s the lens that we experience our running through. My “lens” was very different for the uphill run than it typically is. I welcomed the pain as I appreciated being alive to experience it. I made the conscientious decision to take in every aspect of the run taking in the beauty of the scenery, despite the thinning air. I paid extra attention to my senses. I felt the cool breeze blow through my hair and the sweat dripping from my brow. I could feel my heart pounding in my body and it never felt so good. Sometimes it takes tragedy for us to realize what a gift it is to get to go out for a run.

Rolling out of bed on Thursday morning I wasn’t expecting to get much more than a good workout in but I got a brand new appreciation for life. It served as a good reminder for me to really enjoy these last couple of weeks before the marathon. It often get into countdown mode, thinking about how many more long tempos or long hard runs are left. Thursday reminded me to take in every moment of every day. After all, it’s the journey that makes the summit so special. If someone took you to the summit of Everest in a helicopter you would appreciate being there, but if you just spent years of training and preparation and had just completed a long and treacherous journey to the top of Everest you would have a whole different sense of accomplishment when you summit. I have spent the last 13 years of my life trying to make it to the summit of my career. I haven’t been to the top yet, but it feels close. But even if I get to the summit on November 1st, if I get there and haven’t enjoyed each step of the journey than I have lost. Life is to precious to wish a moment away.

Ever since I signed with Asics in 2005 I had heard stories about the Asics Research and Development Center in Kobe, Japan and the special custom shoes that were being turned out for their athletes. This past spring I had the opportunity to take a two-day trip to Kobe and get a pair of my own shoes built. The trip opened up my mind to what all goes into making a custom pair of shoes and ultimately made me glad I wasn’t wearing someone else’s custom shoes when I was a kid.

Going to the Asics R&D center I knew that they would measure my foot a couple of different ways using cutting edge technology, however I wasn’t prepared for all that my 36 hour trip would involve. I had no idea what goes into making my shoes. There were about seven different experts that I met with throughout the day. Some measured my leg lengths, some measured my arch using a high tech devise that will be available to the pubic in the new Asics store about to open in New York in a few weeks. Then there were a couple stations that I had to be physically put to the test. They had me perform all out leg exercises so they could take into account my leg strength ratio and my strength in relation to other marathoners. The test that I personally liked the best was a running test where I literally ran through the middle of the building on a indoor/outdoor track that runs in and out of the building, landing on plates that measured my ground impact force and reaction time.

At the end of my testing they sat me down and went over all my running mechanics, giving me strengthening and stretching tips. What I love about the Japanese is that they tell you how it is. So when they respectfully told me that I “ran like a girl” I wasn’t too surprised and tried to take it in stride. If I didn’t get it by now that they were only doing everything in there power to make me better I never would. I thought I was flying half way around the world to get a pair of shoes made but with a company with a slogan of “A Sound Mind in a Sound Body” I should have known I would be getting much, much more than a pair of shoes.

After a hard day at the office I enjoyed some traditional Japanese hospitality when we went to get my first taste of Kobe steak. I can’t even begin to describe how good Kobe steak is. You have to go there and try it for yourself. Before catching my afternoon flight the next day I had to opportunity to visit the Asics Global Headquarters and meet the faces that make up Asics. I met many enthusiastic employees but my highlight had to be meeting with the President, Chairmen and other VIPs from the Global Office. I admit that I was pretty nervous as they ushered us in to a leather chair lounge for our meeting. I got even more nervous when I saw the barrage of suited men walking toward me as I took inventory of my attire, or lack there of. They were very gracious as we exchanged hellos and found our seats. Then the Chairmen said something that I was least expecting, “your wife is so beautiful.” Instantly all the tension in my body melted away as I thought to myself I can’t wait to tell Sara about this one.

I left Kobe knowing that the first time I race a marathon, at the 2009 ING NYC marathon, in my new custom designed racing shoes I will have no doubt that I am in the perfect shoes for me. The experts at Asics took everything that makes me who I am and made a shoe around that. It is easy to take a mold of a foot and make a shoe around it, it is another thing to design a shoe around an entire body, which is exactly what my shoe is. My shoe is not just a customized shoe it a customized extension of me.

It took about six weeks till I came home one day from practice to find the very normal looking package waiting for me outside my door that I had been waiting for since my youth. I knew it would take time to make my shoes because I saw the workers putting the finishing touches on one of my buddies pairs of track spikes. It is pretty cool that when I lace up my shoes before the NYC marathon I will see all the faces behind the shoe, from the woman who is responsible for bunching the holes, to the technician who analyzed my stride impact force, to the Chairmen who acknowledges my wife’s good looks, I will feel their support in more ways than through my shoes absorbing the tough roads of New York.

It’s ironic that I am writing about lacking an outward focus less than two days after Sara and I launched our foundation, the Hall Steps Foundation. Its goal is taking small steps towards the marathon goal of ending poverty. The vision for the foundation came from one of my personal heroes, Mother Teresa, who said, “I can do no great things, just small things with great love.” Out of this quote our slogan was born, “small steps, great love”. Marathoners know best about taking lots of small steps towards accomplishing a seemingly impossible goal, whether it’s to break 2 hours or 8. Through the Hall Steps Foundation our aim is to encourage runners to take their own “small steps” by focusing outside themselves on others both in their community and around the world living in poverty.

Yet, despite my excitement about starting this endeavor and belief in its mission, somehow I had lost focus. This morning I woke up with the wrong perspective and forgotten my life and running is not all about me. I had forgotten that the truly special moments that I have experienced in running are all when I was outwardly-focused. When I set my mind on God and praising Him through my running, thinking about my wife, family, and all those who I love, and remembering the people I am impacting produce a positive force in my running and is how God designed me to ideally function. The more I reach out to positively impact others, the more my motivation and focus changes when running. After visiting Zambia with World Vision in the fall of 2008, the faces of the kids we were to bring clean water to became burned in my mind’s eye. I often go there when I am hurting on a run finding new strength that I couldn’t find in myself.

The goal of today’s run was to preview the last 20 miles of the NYC marathon course, but I accomplished so much more than that. I learned an important lesson about what enables me to really fly: focusing outside myself by focusing on others I love. Come marathon day, rather than thinking about the bridges I will have to climb or my competitors beside me, I will think about the kids impacted by the Hall Steps Foundation. I will think of kids I met last Thursday on the South Bronx’s Team Jaguars and the other Young Runners programs in low-income areas of each of the five boroughs that will experience the joy of running. I will think of the children forced into slavery or prostitution that will be freed by funding a lawyer through International Justice Mission. I will think of the youth of Kenya and Zambia that now have clean water through World Vision. And these images will spur me on as I keep looking outward to them.

I’d like to challenge you all do the same, to focus outside yourselves and commit your running to loving others. If you don’t already have a cause to run for, join me in running for The Hall Steps Foundation and combating poverty in the US and abroad. Check it out at www.TheStepsFoundation.org.

Traveling from Mammoth is a bit of a journey when the daily winter flights are not in operation. It requires a three-hour drive to Reno, staying over in a hotel, and then working out before catching an early flight to the east coast the next day. It was fun to travel again, especially since I was traveling with my wife, my buddy Josh, and my massage therapist Leigh. Traveling with friends makes the trip so much better.

The first thing I did in Philly was go for a half hour shake-out jog, which I highly recommend after a long day of travel. Honestly, often times it is the last thing I feel like doing but it is a great way for my body to adjust to the time change and flush all the junk out of my legs rather than sleeping with it and feeling twice as bad in the morning. After about 15 minutes of my legs flushing themselves out I began to feel really good. Before hitting the sack I got a massage from Leigh and indulged in a Philly cheese steak.

Friday was a social day filled with expo appearances and meeting other runners. Even though I am usually the one up with the mic giving advice to other runners I often feel that I learn more from them as they learn from me. The day ended with a special dinner for the meet organizers, sponsors and athletes at a Museum.

Saturday was pretty low key. I try and schedule as little as possible the day before the race, just a massage, run, nap, and lots of preparing my spirit to run. My wife had to leave for her race in Providence at about noon but luckily I had my teammates Mike and Josh Cox to keep me company and keep my mind off the race. One of my old coaches gave me a great piece of advice that I still implement to this day. He told me to think about the race a lot in my months and weeks of training leading up to the race but then the last couple of days not to think about it at all until I start warming up. A lot of waisted energy can be lost in those final days worrying, contemplating, and thinking about the race so I find it is better to do all the thinking well in advance and then show up and live it out on the race weekend. Easier said than done I admit, but something for us to strive after.
When I woke up on Sunday morning I went straight to my knees. There is no better place to be on race morning than praying. I don’t pray for victory but I do pray for a supernatural experience of God as I run. I pray to experience heaven on earth. I have had a few times when I feel like I have experienced it and that was enough for me to keep asking God to experience it over and over again. Its addicting. After saying my morning prayers I had my bagel with almond butter and Cytomax gel and walked over to the window to check the weather, which was perfect.

It really was the perfect day to run. I will never forget being on the starting line and looking back at the thousands of runners about to embark on the 13.1 mile journey with me. It is a very special time of unity that I think everyone should experience at some point in there life. When the gun fired and we got under way I went out at a pace that I knew I could manage for the distance. I was hoping to look down and see a fast split at the mile mark, in hopes of making for a special day, but seeing a 4:40 for the first mile I knew that it was unlikely. I went to the front and pushed a little harder hoping that maybe I just needed to run a little harder to get better warmed up, but again I saw the split of 4:40. At that point I knew that a personal best would have to wait for another day. Sometimes things don’t click perfectly and you have to set new goals within the race. So rather than bagging the race as a complete loss I came up with a new goal of forgetting about the time and practice trying to win the race.
By mile 8 there was four of us remaining. I decided to test out how everyone was feeling, myself included, by throwing in a little surge. I was trying to find a way to wake myself up from the monotonous rhythm we had established. The pace felt comfortable, almost like marathon pace, but whenever I tried to pick up the intensity just a little bit, the effort would go up exponentially. This is often the case when I am racing while in the middle of marathon training. Since I wasn’t feeling that I could maintain a faster pace I tucked back in the pack and waited.

With a couple of miles left to go I committed that I would make a hard move with a mile remaining and run as hard as I could for the last mile. Committing to a plan can be a good thing because it makes you surge whether you feel like it or not. It often times feels like it is impossible to go any faster but if you can find some trigger to change gears you often feel better when you pick it up. This is one of the advantages of running a course that has some down hills that more naturally trigger a change in gears.

I put my head down and ran my heart out that last mile. I had no idea how the other guys where feeling and honestly I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t thinking about trying to win or anything like that, I was just thinking about running as hard as I could. What resulted was a 4:27 last mile and walking a way with a victory. It was very special to win in front of the crowd in Philly. They were very enthusiastic and loud the last 100 meters. It felt great to get across the line. Mission accomplished!

Marathoning is much like cycling. I look up to Lance Armstrong as an athlete who has not only done what I would like to do the equivalent of in the running world, but also because he has used his physical feats to help others. I have read a couple books about Lance where they talk about the timing of peaking for the tour. It’s all about coming into peak form and the right race weight at precisely the right time to win the tour. I remember in a race leading up to one of the tours that Lance won he responded to a reporters question about what was his goal for the competition and he replied, “to not get last.”

It’s really hard to go into buildup races for the marathon not in peak form but I know that if I really want the best shot to win NYC this fall I have to be so focused on that goal that I am willing to suffer in the races leading up to the competition. It is a bit ironic that I am writing this less than a week out from my last race, The Philadelphia Distance Classic, before NYC. It is not like I am not going to try and run fast at Philly or that I am expecting to get destroyed (I always go to the line with the expectation that something special could happen), but my point is that focus on the big goal and sacrifice is part of the price of being great.

It’s been a fairly typical week for me: intervals on Tuesday, Tempo run on Thursday and 20 miles hard on Sunday. However, last week was a significant week in that it marked the end of the initial buildup cycle for the marathon. From the time I arrived in Mammoth in the beginning of July till now it has all been about getting a good base level of fitness. Now it is time to go get one last indicator of where I am at before the real work begins. Along with the change of weather this week marks the winds of change in my training fast approaching.

On Sunday I race in Philly, then take a train to New York City where my wife and I will spend the next week. I am not only looking forward to a week out of altitude to recover and gear up for the intense training awaiting me, but I am also looking forward to announcing some very exciting news sometime in the middle of next week. On Saturday I will get to watch Sara compete in the 5th Ave mile and then we’ll catch an evening flight back to Reno that same day.

Monday the storm hits. If I am going to win the ING NYC marathon it will be as a result of what is done in those last 4 weeks of hard training before backing off for the race. An exciting season is on the way.

One important lesson I learned last year at the Olympics was that not everyone could win. Not exactly earth-shattering insight I know and you would think it a shame that it took me 13 years of running and competing in the Olympics to figure it out, but I guess sometimes the simplest lessons take the longest to learn. What I realized is that no matter how bad I wanted it, no matter how much I believed, no matter how fit and disciplined I could be, on that day the very best I could do was tenth. At first this was hard for me to accept, which made me dig into the issue of winning and losing at greater depths.

What I came up with is that someone has to get tenth in the Olympics, and in the 2008 Olympic marathon that was me. I realized that I needed to change my definition of winning and losing. One of the things that I don’t like about our sport is that there is only one winner, and that one guy/girl may not even be the person who worked the hardest, trained the smartest, believed the most, or did any of those things that we are told from our youth will produce the win. So I have had to change my idea of what it means to win so that I can be confident going to the line confident that whether I come across the finish first or last that I can “win” by my definition of what it means to win.

I have always said that the Bible is the best sports psychology book of all time. When I was working through the issue of winning and losing I stumbled on 1 Corinthians 9:24, which says, “Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win.” For Paul winning meant accomplishing all God intended him to accomplish and entering into heaven. Having been inspired by Paul, I, too have changed my definition of winning so that I have won if I fulfilled all that I was suppose to fulfill and loved God and my neighbor while doing that.

I realize that everyone’s definition of winning won’t be the same and that is fine. What I want to encourage everyone to do, especially youth, is to spend some time and really think about what it means for you to win and how you can accomplish this regardless of how your body performs or how your competitors perform. Running is a beautiful thing when every run can be a success. I try and run in such a way that I win everyday. I want to see everyone win every time they race as well.

My alarm clock sounded at 6:45 am. This would give me just enough time to get dressed, have breakfast, make my pre-long run cup of coffee, make my bottles for the 20 mile run I would be logging, pray, and read my Bible. At 7:40 am I was in my Nissan, Titan pulling out of the driveway headed to my full-time massage therapist house to get a pre-run flush. My mini-massage went till 8:15. I spent the next 10 minutes doing a daily dynamic flexibility routine, then off to practice.

After some small talk with the team we headed up to 9,000ft to run around a couple of lakes in our backyard where we live in Mammoth Lakes. From 9-10:55 I ran my progressive long run, in which the goal is to pick up the pace every 5k throughout the run. It was beautiful day to run. I couldn’t ask for a more scenic and inspiring place to train.

Over the next half hour I stretched out my tired legs and refueled with my typical post-run Cytomax shake. Then it was back into the truck to drive down into town and get some more fuel, in the way of Mexican food (carne asada torta), for a quick lunch and shower. At 12:30 my daily 90-minute massage began, followed by 15 minutes of icing in the cold creek. I ran a couple of errands over the next half hour and headed home to grab a quick snack (yeah, I eat all the time), this time a salad and cup of cereal with a couple of spoonfuls of Muscle Milk Cake Batter.

By this time it was 3:30 and I was heading to the gym to hit the pool for 15 minutes of light kicking. I try and get in the pool for hydrotherapy after hard long runs and hard tempo runs. It does a great job of loosing the legs up. By the time I got back from the gym it was 4:15 and the physical part of my day was complete. Now I just had to catch up on dishes, cleaning the kitchen, and helping with dinner before our dinner guest arrived at 5:15.

Walking into The Lighthouse Church at 7:00 pm I told Sara I was going to need a wheelchair to get into church. The coffee was well out of my system by now and I was finally feeling the fatigue from the run, not so much in my legs as I had done plenty to get my legs recovered from the effort (massage, ice bath, kicking in the pool), it was more of a total body fatigue that usually puts me to bed early. However, as I stood in church worshipping God I could feel my spirit being restored and my body being replenished. It was amazing. All the sudden I didn’t feel that bad anymore and I felt a new motivation and drive for the coming hard week of training that I certainly did not walk in with.

Running is more than a job it is a lifestyle. I have to be conscientious of what I put in my body, when I get up in the morning and when I go to bed. I have to train not only my body on the runs, I also have to spend a lot of time recovering from them. But I can’t just train my body I have to train my body, mind, and spirit. Professional running isn’t for everyone, but it is for me. I absolutely love it. Sure it makes for some busy days but when I am feeling overly busy I just remind myself that I am busy with running in the forest, taking naps, and getting massage. Life is good!