Hi there! It's been a while. Since my last post more than two and a half years ago, a lot of things have happened which cannot be summed up on a running blog. The pandemic has been rough on all of us, but on some more than others. I have been fortunate in most important respects. None of my close family members or friends died or suffered severe cases of Covid, and I myself never knowingly got it (still!) or at least never had symptoms. But my running has of course regressed over the past couple years at least partly as a result of the pandemic, and I'm also not getting any younger (I'm now 47). In addition to the general lack of motivation to train without any races to train for, I fell into an injury cycle that lasted over a year. Hopefully that is behind me now. I've been running consistently again since the beginning of 2022 leading up to the Shamrock Marathon in March. My goal at Shamrock was just to cover the marathon distance at whatever pace I could manage, which turned out to be a 7:28 average pace for a 3:15 marathon. That's better than I expected, especially since I had only been running for 10 weeks and only two of those weeks were over 40 miles. Since then I've been gradually reintroducing speedwork and slowly increasing overall volume. In the past month I strung together three consecutive 50 mile weeks before taking a 40 mile down week, usually with one speed workout per week. I've also run three 5ks in the past two months to gauge the progress of my speedwork (not much yet!) and to give me short term goals to focus on. I hope to turn the screws a bit in the next month or so by doing a 5k on the weekends and also a speed workout during the week, at least most weeks. We'll see how that goes. My goal for the summer is to get some speed back and to adapt to a consistent training schedule with volume at the sort of level where I can handle more serious training for longer races in the Fall, eventually leading up to the Rehoboth Seashore Marathon in early December. In late July we'll head back to Greece for the first time in three years! I'm really looking forward to that and will try to post some photos here as well as on Strava, etc. Then I plan to return to the Annapolis 10 Miler on August 28 to close out the summer and shift towards longer distance races in the Fall. Mostly for the sake of accountability and to force me to think about the overall coherence of my training, I'll try to return to posting weekly training summaries here.
