It’s Tuesday here at The DNF because I wanted to finally spend a little time on a post and introduce my training partner, Wismith. You’ll meet him on Sunday. Let’s start from the beginning.
Monday: I did about five hours of shoveling, off and on throughout the day. By the time I was finished, there was no time or energy left for running.
Tuesday: Back on the treadmill. 9 miles easy. Very sore from shoveling.
Wednesday: 11 miles, with 30 minutes at tempo pace, mostly on the treadmill. I’m still approaching my treadmill tempos with skepticism, but I used a different treadmill at the gym today and 10 mph still felt very smooth. By the end of my 30 minutes I had progressed to 10.4 (5:46 pace). I was starting to get tired by then, but otherwise I felt good.
Thursday: MLR mostly on the treadmill. Started around 7:30 pace, worked my way to 7:05 and stayed there for a while, and then closed a little harder. Felt good!
Doubled back for 3 easy miles on the treadmill at lunch. This was surprisingly tough and threw me off for the rest of the day. I was just trying to make up some of the mileage I missed on Monday. Maybe that was a mistake. My left hip hurt.
Friday: Back to 9 miles easy with the treadmill. A little soreness left over from Thursday’s double.
Spent the rest of the day caring for a sick baby who had to stay home from daycare, and then started to feel a lot sicker myself. After getting nap-trapped in the nursery for two and a half hours (I should have started drafting this post!), my whole body ached.
Saturday: 9 miles easy again. I almost didn’t run at all because I was feeling so bad from my son’s germs, but with a down week coming up I kept telling myself that I was going to rest soon and only needed to push a little bit more. The rest of the day did not feel great.
Sunday: 22 miles, mostly in the 7:15-7:30 range, with a slight pickup over the last couple miles. Thank goodness I woke up feeling less sick than Friday and Saturday, and thank goodness I had a friend with me the entire way.
I have been meaning to write for a while about my friend Wismith, who is running Jersey City with me as his first marathon.
Wismith seems to know absolutely everybody in the Montclair running scene, so it’s not a surprise that we eventually came to meet. I was starting 600-meter repeats at the track as he and some other local runners were wrapping up their workout. I’m pretty sure Wis followed me on Strava later that day, even though everyone had left by the time my workout wrapped and we were never properly introduced. He knows everybody in town because he makes the effort like that. This was three summers ago.
Once you know somebody even a little bit, you start to recognize them around town. We crossed paths on morning runs and would say Hey. Eventually we started running together on purpose, sometimes workouts, sometimes easy, sometimes for coffee. I joked to my wife about how rare and weird it was to be making a new friend as a man in his thirties. But it was also really nice.
When you run together, there’s not much to do but talk, so you talk a lot. By the time Wis and I were hanging out more regularly, my wife and I were looking for a place to settle down and have our baby. I had a lot on my mind. Wis heard all my takes on the housing market and impending fatherhood, endless rumination on the Boston Marathon and its qualifying procedure, stupid gripes about work, and plenty of high school track war stories. I heard a lot of the same from him: the night classes he was taking to get an advanced degree in nursing, new opportunities at work, race reports—Wis races way more often than I do—and high school track war stories. The pace always quickens when the glory days come up.
In August, I got a text from Wis that he “had an idea” and “we need to talk”. I said it felt like I was in Ocean’s Eleven and he said it was more like The Town.
Well, OK then. Whose car are we gonna take?
Wis met me right after I ran 2:57. That fall he heard about how I was rejected from Boston. The next year he watched it happen again, and then he watched me rush a buildup to Rehoboth for one last shot before my son was born. He even talked about signing up for Rehoboth to give me a boost, but I understood when he didn’t. Besides a college teammate or a pro on a contract, who does that?
Wis does, apparently. He wanted in on Jersey City 2026 to see what the marathon was all about, and to try to pace me to a 2:50.
It should be stated plainly that Wis is a better runner than me. He regularly runs half marathons south of 80 minutes, and 5Ks under 17. We are close enough in ability that running workouts together makes sense, but far enough apart that if I can run 2:50, he can destroy it—as long as he’s ready for the distance. That’s my job in this whole operation.
It has been a lot of fun to train together for this race. We haven’t shared nearly as many miles as we’d have liked because of all our days on the treadmill this dreadful winter, but we’ve been checking in on each other and showing up for the big days, like Sunday. The real fun will be in April when it’s time to rip.
Wis saw me grinding out solo 600s a couple years ago, and on Sunday he ran 22 miles because he’s training for his first marathon to help me finally secure my BQ. Most people would tell you they don’t make friends like that anymore. They haven’t met Wis.
But if they went running enough in Montclair, New Jersey, they would.
This Week: 75 miles. Another nice big number on the board before pulling back next week. This was hard-fought and I’m really glad we got it done.
The way my treadmill tempos have been going, and the way I felt after 22 miles on Sunday, I think we could be building toward something big. I’m really good at putting limits on myself. I have trouble seeing higher up the mountain. But I want to believe I can see a little higher right now. Only a little, and only a glimmer, but maybe it’s there.
A week to rest, another push, and we’ll find out.
Baby: My son spent the week bouncing back from an illness and had a bit of a backslide on Friday. Despite some rough nights over the weekend, he seems to have finally kicked it and is happy and healthy and chatty and hungry again. He also stood without support for the first time! It was only for a few seconds, but it shows how much stronger he’s getting. We’re on our way to walking! You know what they say about walking—you gotta do it before you run.
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