The holidays are always a crazy time, but they’re even more so when it’s your baby’s First Christmas. Even with the week off from work, my wife and I were very busy wrapping gifts and packing our bags for a few days with family. If you’re my wife, you were also busy making some delicious treats for the festivities. If you’re me, you were also busy being a sicko and running 12 miles the morning of Christmas Eve.
When you’re not training for anything, this time of year is the perfect excuse to hang up your running shoes for a few days and unwind, but once you have a race on the calendar it becomes a serious test of your time management skills. It can also quickly become an invitation to push through lots of extra stress on your mind and body, all in the name of “being dedicated.”
Having my wife and son around helped keep things in perspective. After getting my Medium Long Run done the morning of Christmas Eve, spending the whole rest of the day with several iterations of my wife’s extended family, and then driving our sleeping baby home late at night, I felt satisfied that I’d done the right things for myself and my family. I also felt exhausted, and certain that I’d earned an extra rest day despite the miles Pete Pfitzinger had scratched on my calendar.
Christmas Day was completely for family. My wife and son and I had to rally after the busy day before, but we enjoyed each other and our holiday very much.
The discourse around running on Christmas was pleasantly aligned with my own experience this year, and neatly summed up by Runner’s World’s Theo Kahler:
My apologies that absolutely everything on that site is paywalled and crawling with ads these days. Theo’s thesis, which I was able to gather from screenshots he shared on Twitter, is that running on Christmas is about fun, not fitness. It wasn’t going to be fun for me this year, so I didn’t go. Maybe next year I will, but either way it’s not important unless it comes from the same joy as the holiday itself. You have the whole rest of the week to be a sicko.
And I was a sicko this week! There is no other way to describe running 16 miles on a treadmill in a crowded gym, with no headphones, in the early hours of a Sunday morning. I do not recommend it!
Monday: After the whirlwind of the holidays, I barely even remember Monday, but it was a day off from running.
Tuesday: 9 miles with 6 x 10″ hill sprints and 8 x 100-meter strides. The hill and the track are about a mile apart, so I got some rest in between. It was snowing, which was a bit of a problem for the strides on the track, but I think it may have helped me focus on good form. There’s not a lot of room for error once you start sliding around. Overall, this was good.
Wednesday: 12 miles at MLR effort, which I may have overcooked by averaging just about 7′ pace for the last 7 or 8 miles. My right leg hurt the last couple miles, which really hits home how important it is not to exceed the paces in this plan. I’m doing more quality than I’m used to, so I need to be smart about it.
Thursday: Christmas Eve was very fun, but a long night, and my son did not appreciate the disruption to his schedule. After finally getting everyone to bed at 1 in the morning, I took Christmas Day off.
Friday: This was a really good 9-mile aerobic run. My right leg still hurt, which put a damper on things, but the engine is warming up even if the chassis has a few bolts loose. Pfitz puts a lot of emphasis on spending longish amounts of time at the fast end of easy pace, so it makes sense that that’s where I’m seeing improvements, and it makes sense that that’s where you’d want to improve approaching a marathon. Days like today help me trust the plan.
Saturday: 6, extremely easy. Had to wake up early to shovel myself out for a dentist appointment, then finish shoveling when I got home, so I squeezed this run into the afternoon. I was not in a mood to run, especially on a treadmill, and neither was my body. Glad I got it done.
Sunday: 16 on the treadmill, with 8 at marathon pace (first 2 @ 6:40, next 6 @ 6:35). This was brutal for a few reasons. The most obvious reason is that I was on a treadmill for nearly two hours; another is that I had no entertainment or distraction for most of that time; another is I tried new gels for the first time, which are much higher in carbs than I’m used to and took some effort to digest; another is that my knee had already been bothering me for several days, and flared up again with at least four miles still to go.
It was not fun, but I gutted it out to the end. In a weird way, that’s pretty satisfying. I just hope my next marathon pace workout isn’t anything like this one.
This Week: 52 miles, with serious quality on Sunday and really nice sessions on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. My mileage isn’t as high as I’d like it to be, but I’ve got months until my race and I’m probably getting much better bang for my buck by training this way than running 70 miles at mostly 8′ pace (like I had wanted to earlier this year). Like training on Christmas, mileage numbers are extremely attractive to the ego but only truly serve you when you approach them with a clear head.
Baby: My son had his first Christmas! It was wonderful to spend more quality time with him than usual, with no work and no daycare. He is getting stronger, more energetic, and more clever all the time! And he was a very good boy this year, so Santa (and all our relatives) brought him lots of gifts.
He has also started teething again, and my wife and I think it’s for real this time. He has been much more sensitive this week, with random tantrums and a much stronger need to be held. Normally he has little patience for cuddles and would rather be exploring! It looks like it’s his top teeth coming in now. For all our sakes, we hope they arrive very soon.
theDNF 
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