Author: theDNF

Last week was my son’s first week at daycare, and my wife’s first week back at work, which meant new routines for all of us. For me, that meant an earlier wakeup to run and be ready in time for daycare drop-off.

Even when my wife took on drop-off duties, I still got up early. It felt good to start my day ahead of schedule, and to be available to help with the morning send-off, and to beat the summer heat. This was working great for me! I could have it all!

Or, I could have if I had slept enough. I didn’t change my bedtime to match my new morning alarm, and I paid dearly for it. Over the course of five days, I wrote a series of checks my body couldn’t cash and hit the weekend like Wile E Coyote hitting the bottom of an Arizona canyon. Yikes!

This is not my first time overtraining. It’s not even my first time overtraining since my son was born. But it sucks every time.

I’m writing this from my family vacation upstate, and I had aspirations of kick-starting my summer mileage once I got out here. Instead I’ve spent a lot of the first two days with my feet up and my nose in a John Scalzi book. I feel like a Victorian housewife convalescing in the countryside after a “nervous episode”.

And at the same time I feel so energized. Our new routine, though challenging—imagine being on an F1 pit crew for a six-month-old baby—was clicking. Work was clicking; I honestly wish I could write an explainer for the cool problem I’ve been tackling because I’m genuinely excited about it. I was so fired up to pour myself into summer. I still am. I just have to wait.

Fortunately, there are worse places to wait.

Today was my son’s first day of daycare, which you think would mean I was less busy today than normal, but you would be wrong. Thankfully, I have had a post under glass for months, for just such an occasion. Please enjoy this essay about birding while running.

---

“What do you think about when you’re running?”

Anyone who runs has probably heard this question at some point in their life, and everyone has their own answer. It’s a fair question; running certainly gives you a lot of time alone with your thoughts. Everyone has their own answer for this, too.

For decades, music has been running’s favorite tandem activity, though podcasts and audiobooks have recently moved in on that turf. As long as you stay aware of your surroundings, these are all great ways to pass your time out on the roads. If you like to keep your ears open and find your thoughts getting too loud for comfort, though, you may be at a loss.

Thankfully, I have a solution: birding.

Birding is a wonderful hobby by itself, but birding while running supercharges both activities simultaneously.

My wife and I got into birds as a hobby on our honeymoon in Hawaii a few years ago. It was the longest time we had spent together outside our native Northeast US biome, and we were fascinated by all the new birds we saw. As an aside, we were also fascinated by the familiar birds we saw there—neither of us expected to see pigeons on a picturesque beach in Maui, but there they were.

My wife loved the common mynas that flocked around our hotel, with their stylish yellow eyeliner. I would go running in the mornings and share my sightings over breakfast; my favorite spot was a feeder in Lahaina that routinely attracted a flock of Java sparrows. When we drove the Road to Hana, we were greeted on the far side of the island by chestnut munias, and it felt like an extra reward for making the trip.

My wife and I came home from Hawaii as birders, and that practice has transformed my running.

The Merlin app, by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, was invaluable for learning the names of all the unfamiliar birds I saw in Hawaii. It is a Pokédex for birds. It is also Shazam for birds, identifying them by sound as well as sight. I never stopped using the app when I got home, and it felt like meeting the birds I’d known my whole life for the first time.

I’ve learned that each song sparrow interprets the music given to him a little differently, so you should listen for the voice and not the melody. Blue jays, being corvids like crows and ravens, are also surprisingly vocally versatile—and one of the few colorful birds you’ll still see in winter!

I’ve learned the difference between crows and ravens: mainly, it’s size. You know when you’ve seen a raven because it’s big. If you get to hear it, there’s no mistaking.

Unlike lots of other local birds, robins do dig for worms, though I suppose it’s the earlier ones who actually get them. I love when I spot one having a successful hunt. Good job, little guy!

Starlings sound like R2D2. Cardinals sound like sci-fi lasers. If you’re an idiot, like me, you might confuse a robin call for the less common northern flicker and get your hopes up. Catbirds are unmistakable, though—they sound like cats.

Learning your local birds brings them into focus. Suddenly that foraging flock in the park isn’t just “birds”. If you’re me at the local track in the early springtime, it’s robins and juncos. By the pond it’s  duck, duck, goose, and the anticipation that maybe I’ll see a heron or an egret too. One time I saw a double-crested cormorant. Seeing uncommon birds feels like hitting a winning lotto ticket, even if it’s a $5 scratch-off prize in the form of a red-tailed hawk flying particularly low.

From goldfinches to grackles, I could go on and on about all the birds I’ve seen running. I saw a bald eagle near my in-laws’ house in central Jersey. That was a jackpot.

It can be so easy to treat your well-worn loops and routes like a treadmill: familiar, repetitive, boring, rote. Just something you have to do while you’re waiting for your next workout. Birding lets every run surprise you—sometimes just a little, and sometimes a whole lot. Maybe you hear a mockingbird practicing its repertoire, or you see a bird you haven’t seen in a while, or you see a bird you’ve never seen in person before, or you see a bird you’ve never seen at all. Remember to look it up on Merlin when you get home!

Besides the fact that you can do both outside, running and birding have something else in common that makes them great partners. Running and birding both create pride of place. Your local birds and your local running routes are special because they’re yours. When you take the time to know them and treat them like they’re special, it feels like having a bigger house. Having lived in this corner of Essex County for ten years, I’ve run a lot of streets, seen a lot of birds, and met a lot of people. My house feels pretty big.

I’m not saying running or birding will make you a better member of your community, but they certainly could.

What I am saying is that running and birding are two great hobbies that get better together. I would even say that doing both kills two birds with one stone, but that seems against the spirit of the post.

Turn your next easy run into a bird outing. See what you find.

---

The island of Maui, while beloved by honeymooners, is far more importantly home to over 160,000 people, and that home was ravaged by wildfires just a few months after my wife and I returned from our trip. Recovery is ongoing.

The Maui County government maintains a website for community organization and resources called Maui Nui Strong, and it includes a list of charitable organizations responding to the continuing needs of wildfire victims.

While I was struggling to stay on the cross country team in college, I also took a few classes in creative writing, and a couple of those were in poetry. I don’t write as much as I’d like—or, I don’t write well as often as I’d like—but every once in a while an idea pops up and I have to (pardon me) run with it.

Given that my readership is so small, and I have little else to post this week, I think I’ll share something that came to me this afternoon:

Untitled

If Boston was the cradle of our country,
it grew into her teenage bedroom:
rowdy and aspirational,
moody and cold—
a walled garden
of perfect essays and SAT scores,
an underdog,
cursed by Bambino,
redeemed by Papi,
saved by Meb,
sainted by Des.
The last stop for everyone
who will never make the Olympics,
which is everyone,
give or take.

I skip my run this morning and do the dishes,
water the plants,
fix coffee in our remodeled kitchen
(but not by us);
gray skies over Jersey.
It’s mornings like these I stop sweating
and count my luck:
a morning without Boston,
without obsession,
allowing myself to age for a moment
before I continue
the remodel of the last half-decade.
I’ve gotta get to Boston
so I can enjoy more mornings like this
in peace.

I’ve gotta get to Boston
because that’s where it started,
and that’s where it ends:

We begin again with our hero in Jersey,
the Hero’s Journey completed—
swords into plowshares
into birdhouses
and herb gardens and preschool.
A chickadee fledges,
forages, furrows its brow,
burrows into mother.
Gray skies overhead,
weather that could always be something else:
hot, humid, static.
Static on the TV screen
moving endlessly,
shifting, waiting
for the latest prestige dramedy to drop
and binge.
This one’s about family,
the one on the couch,
shoes on the rack,
medal on the mantle,
head on the pillow.
I set my alarm;
run tomorrow.

See you next week.

This past Thursday was the Sunset Classic 5-miler in Bloomfield. My employer partly sponsors this race, so we always get a group together from work to run and share a pizza dinner afterward. It’s also a big draw for the local running community, with several clubs showing up in large numbers. Between my local running friends and my coworkers, it’s a fun night of familiar faces all gathered around my most precious hobby. What’s not to like?

Coming off the birth of my son earlier this year and the few months of uncomplicated training (and increased stress levels) that followed, I was apprehensive about this year’s race. In my last post, I wrote about the 30:56 I ran at Sunset 2023 as a possible benchmark, with my post-collegiate 5-mile best of 30:23 as an afterthought for a potential A-plus day. As the race got closer, setting up these goalposts almost felt like a mistake, as I had no idea what kind of shape I was in and had now given myself something to live up to. General apprehension turned into the specific, steady background hum of anxiety.

I tried to simplify: by the time the gun went off, my only goals were to get out in 6:15 for the first mile, get to the top of Sunset Ave without overextending myself, and see what happened after that.

What happened after that was I ran 29:51, which is the fastest I’ve run over that distance since I ran 8K (close enough) in 27:58 as a junior on my college cross country team. That was in 2011.

As I reflect on the race, I have several questions, and several plausible answers.

How did I misjudge my fitness by this much?

While I knew deep down I’d love to break 30 minutes on the Sunset course, I assumed that would be a goal for 2026 at best. Here, I was nervous about blowing up completely trying to break 31. Why was I so worried?

My first guess is I underestimated the impact of all the hill workouts I ran over the last several months, as well as the strides and strength work I put in. It wasn’t much, but I suppose it was more than doing nothing. I just thought it was closer to nothing than what I ended up getting out of it.

Also, Dad Strength is real. My shoulders and chest felt much better after five months of lugging my son around than they did when I was an office worker with no kids and no strength routine.

Speaking of my son, I think he was a big reason why I was keeping my expectations low. I didn’t want to be too aggressive and set myself up to fail (a mistake I nonetheless made right out of the gate). I didn’t want to strain against my new circumstances trying to do something I could try again at next year—but I also assumed that if I did strain, the circumstances would overpower me. Even with strong workouts coming in almost every week, I listened to that fear instead of the data.

It wasn’t just fear that I couldn’t be a dad and a runner at the same time, either. Thirty minutes is a nice round number, one I haven’t broken since I was in college and in close to the shape of my life. I like a nice round number when I’m changing the volume on my TV, or calculating the tip at a restaurant, but when running I find them intimidating. Round numbers ask questions of you. So, you think you’re a sub-30 guy?

Turns out I am, but I didn’t believe it on the starting line. Which raises the next question:

How did I run so much faster than expected despite my lack of confidence?

The short answer here is an unusually strong mental performance, but I want to elaborate because I finally noticed and put a name to a few things after this race.

First, I went into the race with a simple, action-oriented plan that made it easy to maintain a flexible and resilient racing mentality out on the course. The best races I have had over the last few years—my 4:58 mile in 2023 and my 2:52 marathon in Rehoboth come to mind, as well as this one—went as well as they did because I gave myself simple instructions: “compete more,” or “be patient,” or, in the case of Sunset, “go out in 6:15, climb the hill, and see what happens.”

People who talk about performance talk a lot about process-oriented goals, rather than outcome-oriented ones. Maybe I’m learning this a bit late at 33 years old, but they really do work.

There was something else I noticed about the instructions I gave myself on Thursday, the ones after I’d gotten to the “see what happens” part of the race plan. My self-talk was patient and gentle: “stay right here,” “don’t force it.” Maybe it’s me, but I always imagine the self-talk of a personal-best performance will sound like something out of Rocky.

That’s not to say I didn’t have moments where I was aggressive—namely, at the tops or bottoms of hills and other places on the course where I was naturally tempted to slow down, I looked at the runners ahead of me and stepped on the gas. It was important to keep going. After I got back up to pace, the gentle talk would return: “that’s enough,” “just keep rolling.”

If I were in a worse headspace, I might have panicked about the pace being too hot. Instead, I was calm and open-minded. “See what happens” left me a lot of room to work.

While it felt like a mistake leading up to the gun, setting a few different time goals also gave me a lot of room to work. I knew after three miles that I was going to blow past my course best. I knew after four that I was going to beat my post-collegiate best. It wasn’t until maybe four and a half miles that I really seriously considered pushing for sub-30. I think if that had been my goal from the beginning, I wouldn’t have made it.

With only 8 seconds to spare, I likely also wouldn’t have made it if the weather hadn’t been extremely favorable for a late-June evening race. After hitting the high nineties just a few days earlier, temperatures were in the low seventies by gun time. There was a light breeze. The humidity was tolerable—a miracle for summer in Jersey. Simply put, I will likely never have a night like that for the Sunset Classic ever again.

I’m glad I put myself in the best possible position to capitalize.

How should I adjust my goals for the future?

For the first time since 2011, I am once again a sub-30 guy. It feels really good. Now, I’m thinking about where I’m going from here.

Five miles in 29:51 is worth about 18:05 for 5K and 2:53-low for the marathon, according to VDOT. I’d love to be running 17:30 and 2:49, so this doesn’t move the needle much on pure numbers, but we can look at how I’ve run in the past to see what this might be worth for me, specifically.

In 2023, I ran a 2:57 marathon in April, 30:56 at Sunset in June, and a 4:58 mile in July. Taking a minute off that 5-mile time has me feeling good about those other two distances. It has me thinking I’ve lost far less fitness than I expected since Rehoboth and the birth of my son. If I spend the summer building mileage, how far can I go from here? Is a sub-80 half marathon (6:05 pace) possible by fall? Am I on track for sub-2:50 (6:29 pace) by next spring?

I guess we’ll see what happens.

After a mild May and a cool and rainy start to June, the first heat wave of summer is here. Heaven help us all.

Right now, the forecast for my race this week is favorable, but it’s on the other side of several days of high-90s temperatures with feels-like-the-inside-of-a-dishwasher humidity and absolutely no wind. I spent a brief 45 minutes mowing the lawn around 7 this morning and came inside dripping. After sitting in the office parking lot all day, my car thought it was 109 degrees at quitting time. We’re in the shit.

My plan is to cut back even more than I had originally planned in the run-up to Sunset, and let the heat make up the difference in training stimulus. I will not be doing any more than a half-hour jog each day between now and Thursday, and even that looks like a lot of work from where I’m sitting. With any luck, the heat dome will lift and I will feel like the first day of fall on the sixth day of summer.

This weekend I met up with some friends for a workout, which is always better than going alone. These guys have made a summer tradition of weekend tempos that get one mile longer every week. This week was five miles. Joining them for the whole workout would have meant racing five miles five days before racing five miles at Sunset, so I rode the bus to halfway and called it a day.

In the future I hope I can join them for more. I have been quietly wanting to feel ready to race a half marathon by the fall, and that is exactly the kind of workout that can get me there. Right now I need to weather the heat dome, stay fresh, run Sunset like a fall breeze (briskly), and let the last few months of training soak in.

After that, bring on the summer miles. Just please spare me the heat.

The Boston Athletic Association gifted me a lead-in to this week’s blog when they imposed a new rule for downhill marathons starting with the 2027 qualifying window.

These have always been a small and weird corner of the qualifier pool, so I don’t expect the impact on qualifying times to be large, but it does feel more “fair” to know there is some sort of standard for Boston-eligible courses. If the Olympic Trials and the Olympic Games have a limit on net downhill for qualifying times, surely it makes sense for the “People’s Olympics” to do the same (and for that limit to be much less stringent, at 1,500 feet).

I’ll be very curious to see what local runner and data cruncher Brian Rock has to say about this. Brian has made a name for himself online predicting the Boston cutoff time the last several years. He, and others like him, have made it much easier for me personally to prepare for the emotions of the September application window; I knew my 2:53:45 had a shot in 2024, but not a good one, and I know my 2:52:48 this year is in no way fit to travel. I expect Rock will look into the impact of downhill races on the cutoff time, and I will take anything he has to say on that pretty seriously.

In the meantime, I’m just trying to get through another week of training toward a five-mile race later this month. Here’s how I’m doing:

Sunday: 8 miles easy at the beach. I ended up stuck at the drawbridge leaving Belmar and made some conversation with a few runners, who I wound up yapping with for the next two miles.

Running is absolutely great for this. It’s similar to the experience I have skiing—people are in a good mood because they’re doing something they enjoy, and you’re doing the same thing, so you’re also in a good mood and you have something in common right away. And running is way cheaper than skiing!

Monday: 3 miles easy.

Tuesday: 7 miles easy with strides. I have been adding distance to my Tuesday and Thursday runs to bulk up my weekly totals. So far so good.

Wednesday: Hill repeats. I added two more repeats to my usual set this week and slowed them down to simulate how I’ll run the hills at the Sunset Classic later this month. The slightly slower pace made a huge difference in how I felt, and I was still able to send the last rep as fast as any I’ve done in a shorter set. I’m really enjoying seeing the effect that hills and strides have had on my running these past few months. It’s starting to raise my expectations for Sunset.

Thursday: 7 miles easy. I was sorer than usual from the hills the day before and the extra mileage this week.

Friday: 4 miles easy with strides. Still sore.

Saturday: 3 x 1 mile at tempo pace (6:01, 5:59, 5:55) with 1 minute rest. This went really well thanks to the weather, which has taken a turn for the cooler lately. The fact that I’m hitting these times while stretching out my mileage has me thinking seriously about a personal best at the Sunset Classic.

In 2023, I came off my first sub-3 marathon in April to set a ten-second personal best over the five-mile Sunset Classic course that June. I finally ran the hilly course correctly (read: conservatively), and I had a lot left over the final miles. I felt great.

My workouts in 2023 didn’t indicate that I was in any special kind of shape, but I put it together on race day for a really pleasant surprise. My workouts this summer have me several steps ahead of where I was two years ago, even having to rebuild after my son was born, so I am now trying to decide what my goals should be. I have two times in mind:

1. 30:56 (personal best for this course)
2. 30:23 (best five-mile performance since college, set in 2018)

The big question underlying this exercise is how much endurance I still have after running mostly low mileage since December. I ran 30:56 off the strength of a marathon block, with middling workouts on the track. I ran 30:23 on a flatter course, in cooler (read: freezing cold) conditions, seven years ago, off less mileage and more speed. How does 2025 compare to either of those?

I’ve decided, at the very least, that I want to give myself the best chance possible of finding out. I’ll be dialing back the mileage just a bit until the race; the past two weeks at 40-plus have been encouraging, but tiring. I’m going to sharpen up, full send at Sunset, and regroup for some bigger mileage this summer.

This past week was my first 40 since my son was born:

Sunday: 8 comfortable miles before driving down to Grand Slam Track in Philly.

Monday: 3 miles from the office on my lunch break. Monday runs have been hard to come by lately, so this was a step towards better consistency.

Tuesday: 6 miles easy with strides.

Wednesday: 4 x 600 meters (1:56, 1:56, 1:54, 1:53) with 3 minutes rest. I found 600-meter repeats really helpful while prepping for a sub-5 mile attempt in 2023. The reps are just long enough that you can’t fake them, but not so long that it hurts too much to hit them at close to mile pace. It is a good speed-endurance stimulus.

I’m not sure if my schedule will allow for a mile or 3K this summer like I’d hoped, but I still want to build speed before attempting a longer training block later this year. This workout made me feel like I am, in fact, building speed. My splits were quicker than in 2023, and I felt strong when pushing the pace. I think the hill reps and strides and strength work I have been doing have been working. A little bit of Dad Discipline goes a long way.

Thursday: Another 6 miles easy.

Friday: 4 miles easy with strides.

Saturday: 3 miles at tempo pace (6:10 average) on the boardwalk in Asbury Park. My wife and I took a trip to Belmar this weekend, leaving our boy with her parents nearby in Central Jersey. I wanted to go somewhere my wife could relax and recharge as her maternity leave winds down. Belmar was where I proposed to her, so suffice to say it has treated us well in the past.

We ate well, read books on the beach, played pinball at the Silverball Museum, drank rum buckets, visited a bookstore, and played mini golf. It was everything she loves to do except spend quality time with our little guy; we had a wonderful trip, and we still missed him the whole time.

---

While this all feels like a huge win for discipline and consistency (and for a happy marriage), there was one important part of my routine that utterly eluded me—sleep. I had seemingly no motivation to go to bed on time; my watch logged me sleeping close to or after 11 PM six of the seven nights this week.

I can forgive myself for sleeping less when I’m on vacation, but that leaves four weeknights stuck in a bad habit. I need to do better than this to keep building into the summer and fall. My first week at forty miles is a small victory, but in the long term it’s only a checkpoint on the way to fifty, or sixty, or more—whatever my new life as a dad will allow.

Though, my wife (and to my surprise, my infant son) have been extremely supportive, so I guess that’s ultimately up to me.

Grand Slam Track made its Philadelphia stop this weekend and did not disappoint. While I was initially frustrated that they would cut the 5000 from the schedule, not least because of the way this impacts the Long Distance group’s ability to earn points (and US Dollars), the two-day format worked a lot better than the three-day slate from Kingston and Miami.

Saturday’s 11 races made for a lot of highlights, including a full reset of Franklin Field’s long-running record book with 11 new facility records. Here’s what stood out to me:

• Marco Arop negative-split a 1:43!
• Melissa Jefferson-Wooden exploded out of the 200-meter blocks and put away a field that included Olympic champ Gabby Thomas!
• Kenny Bednarek likewise put up a no-doubter in his own 200-meter race, extending his Grand Slam winning streak.
• Agnes Ngetich did what I have loved seeing in each of her Slam performances—taking charge of a race and strong-arming the competition from the front of the pack.

The Men’s Short Distance group had me excited for Sunday. Yared Nuguse finished third in the 800, which I thought set him up really well for his specialty in the 1500 meters. The field was deep, adding Paris fifth-placer Hobbs Kessler to an already potent mix.

I was especially excited because I was going to be there! That’s me!

Grand Slam Philadelphia continued to deliver on the second day of competition, and I got to watch.

Admittedly, I got the start time wrong and got us to the stadium having just missed the Women’s 800 meters. What a race to miss! Jessica Hull ran the wackiest third-place I have seen in some time, and Welteji was once again not to be trifled with.

Instead, I caught that on the replay when I got home and entered moments before the start of the Men’s Short Hurdles 100 meters. The roar of the crowd after the gun went off was special. Unlike the Kingston and Miami venues, Franklin Field is a tight-fit stadium. The sound reverberated off of every brick—especially when Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone lined up for the next race.

I was a little disappointed when Grant Fisher didn’t line up for the Men’s 3000 meters, but Nico Young’s blistering finish took the sting out a little. This was my first time watching a pure professional meet in person since Galen Rupp’s 3:50 mile at BU in 2013, and it’s easy to forget how different it is. The guys at the front of your local 5K do not have the gear shift that Nico has, and it’s amazing to see.

The Men’s 1500 meters was the highlight for me. I was pulling for Yared to win his first Slam—I wore the only article of clothing I own with a goose on it—but the race we got was still electric.

As soon as Cole Hocker took charge of the race I knew it would be good. A strong kicker who pushes the pace early is a scary man. I was amazed when Marco went with him, and even moreso when he made a play for the win! Luckily for Marco, he held off enough of the pack to squeeze away with a one-point overall victory. After dominating the 800 at every Slam so far, he surely deserves it.

Cole was nearly rewarded for his own efforts, but Josh Kerr nipped him at the line. This group is an utter free-for-all, which has been thrilling to watch.

Even worse for Cole, he had to make chitchat with an awkward washed-up runner from Jersey after the meet.

That’s right: I got Cole Hocker’s autograph!

I had brought my journal to the Slam specifically for autographs, so you’d think I would be prepared for this interaction.

I was not. Our conversation went exactly like this:

“Cole, do you mind?”

“Sure.”

“That’s my running log.”

“That’s cool, I love that.”

And scene. Cole Hocker was gracious with everyone and none of what you just read is his fault. I called a thank-you after him once I got my wits back.

If you think that’s bad, I almost chickened out of getting the autograph. Thankfully, I had a great crew with me who hyped me up.

Overall, I had a Grand time Slamming in Philly and would definitely go back if Michael Johnson brings his circus back to town next year. For now, I’m looking forward to watching Los Angeles!

This week was a bit of a blur as my wife and I got ready to attend her brother’s wedding on Sunday, which we were looking forward to for a very long time. My marathon PR was 3:05 when he popped the question!

It was a beautiful day full to the brim with love. I love weddings, and the better I know the bride and groom the more this is true. We had a wonderful weekend.

That said, my past week of training feels much less consequential than such a Major Life Event, and also was pretty standard even when not weighed against the sacred bond of marriage, so I’ve been unsure what to post today.

In the spirit of the wedding, I think I can write a little about our groom. My brother-in-law is many things, but most recently—and most relevant to this blog—he has added “runner” to his resume.

He started with 5Ks a few years ago and caught the bug immediately. I think the twin pillars of community and competition you find at most local races spoke to him as both a lifelong theater kid and an all-purpose pick-up athlete. Sadly, he hurt his foot pretty badly in a freak Thanksgiving football accident, proposed to his now-wife in a boot, and was on the shelf for a while as far as running was concerned.

The comeback got serious when some friends encouraged (read: challenged) him to sign up for a sprint triathlon last summer. One sport is enough for me, personally, but our protagonist is not the kind to hit for contact. He’s always swinging for the cheap seats—remember, he’s a theater kid.

We went on vacation together around the time of the US Olympic Trials, and by then he was dialed in. We shared a few miles together most days that week and talked a lot about our training and our goals. I relished the chance to watch someone discover the sport in real time. That he went on to finish that triathlon after injuries and doubt was the icing on the cake.

After crossing your first triathlon finish, what could the next logical step be but a half marathon? He kept in shape through the fall with a few 5Ks. He put winter running gear on his Christmas list, but didn’t wait for it. He logged some miles with me on Christmas Eve. He got really sick, tweaked his knee, put on a few musicals, and crammed for the test with a ten-miler two weeks out from race day. He finished and crushed his goal time.

Watching my brother-in-law grow as a runner has been a blast. When you do it right, growing as a runner means growing as a person, too. Setting big goals, showing up on the good days and the bad, trusting your work, and enjoying the ride are skills that transfer anywhere. Maybe that’s why all the young folks are using their local running clubs to find a date.

Not this guy; he’s officially taken. Congrats!

No big thoughts this week, so let’s recap last week’s training like I did before Rehoboth:

Sunday: 8 miles, slow but not easy. Came home and made that Mother’s Day brunch I wrote about last week.

Monday: No planned run. Planned core. No core.

Tuesday: 5 miles in some lousy, muggy weather. Did some strides that felt good.

Wednesday: 5 x 1′ hills on a loop in town. I’ve been doing these a few times a month to really lift those knees and drive for power, and I think it’s helping even though I’m too tired most of the time to see the results. This set was a bit slower than my last few outings, but I felt more in control and had some gas at the end.

I’m trying hard to balance my effort so I don’t burn out. Right now I’m riding a month-long streak of 30+ miles per week, and I think my legs are starting to notice. Like I said, I’m tired a lot of the time, but it seems like just the right amount. I find myself able to run a little farther on my easy days without feeling like it’s too far. I want to see how long I can keep this up, adding a mile here, a mile there while soaking up some consistent training. I think it’s going to pay off soon.

Thursday: Another bog swamp kind of day. Did 6 easy. Utterly neglected to do core exercises again.

Friday: 4 easy, swampy again, with strides.

Saturday: 3 x 1 mile at tempo pace (6:04 average) with 1′ rest. Humid again; came home soaked like I’d been rained on. Ran too hard. Took the second and third reps out in 89 and didn’t learn any lessons. Just had to hold on. I felt pretty tired on the cooldown but knocked out some split squats and calf raises when I got home, which felt good.

This Week: 36 miles. This morning I did my first Monday run in a while, so I’m hoping I’ll see 40 soon enough. I think this is a pretty good place to be with a not-quite-four-month-old at home, but it’s still frustrating having lost a step from last year’s marathon blocks. I wasn’t running hills like this last year, or doing any sort of strength, so I think that’s keeping me tired but hopefully also making me strong. I want to keep dialing in this routine until I find out.

Baby: My son is teething. There’s really no good way to do it, is there? He’s crankier than usual, but he’s holding up and so are we. Some friends of ours recommended chilling his pacifiers which has been a good quick fix. We’re opening up lots of new devices to help him with the pain, and we’re figuring it out as we go. He needs a little more love these days. Twist my arm.