And It All Crashes Down

I won 19 road races in 2001 and set several PR’s as well. I was on a roll to say the least and training like a madman. It wasn’t uncommon for me to run over 100 miles per week, and I got as high as 114. I saw what the guys I was training with were doing, and I wanted to be as successful as them, so I tried to copy it. Furthermore, since their goal was to qualify for the Olympic Trials, I even got it in my head that running a 2:22 marathon and qualifying myself was not unthinkable. I knew it was a lofty goal and a pretty big stretch, but such was my attitude at the time. If a guy who couldn’t break 27 min for 8k in college could now run just over 25 min for five miles, who knew what else could happen. Also, in some of the bigger races I was doing, I was beating guys who had qualified for the Trials, so if I could beat them, why couldn’t I run a marathon as fast as they had? Sure they might have been training through a race or running shorter than their best distance, but I beat them nonetheless, and ran pretty fast while doing so. I definitely had my focus and thought I knew what I needed to do to get there.

Early in 2002, however, I got injured. It was nothing major, but it knocked me out for a few weeks and hampered my fitness. I was late spring getting back to training and headed over to Lewisburg, WV, in early May for the annual Hospice 10k. This race is a favorite of mine and I had won it several times (and never lost there), and I figured it would be a good return to racing and more or less nothing but a tempo run. The course is extremely hilly, but the year before I had run just over 32 min on it and been told by the race director afterward that they had messed up where they put the finish line and I had actually been sub-32, which was significant because only 2 other runners had ever broken 32 min on that course, both Olympic Trials qualifiers.

In any event, it just so happened that year that a guy by the name of Dave McCollum showed up. Dave was one of the best runners in WV at the time and was actually heading to NY later that month to join Team USA NY (one of several elite training groups that formed around that time). I knew he was better than me and figured I would be running for second, which really aggravated me because I had never lost this race. However, I decided to try to hang with him for as long as I could, and at 3 miles, I found myself taking the lead. Getting tougher mentally was starting to pay off for me. Guys like Howard and George had been telling me for years that I should be running faster than I was because I was fit enough to do so but just didn’t believe. I was overcoming that and starting to run up to my fitness level, maybe even beyond.

In the end, Dave pulled away from me in the last mile to win the race, and I finished second with a time somewhere in the 32:20’s. At my current level of fitness, I should have been ecstatic with how I ran. I shouldn’t have even broken 33 min on that course much less 32:30, but it just wasn’t good enough. I was flat out pissed at having lost, and spent the rest of the day pretty much mad. That afternoon, I went out and hammered a five miler to take out my frustrations. The next morning, my calf hurt pretty bad, but I decided to do my 2 hour run anyway and I ran it hard. After all, I needed to get my sorry butt in shape if I was ever gonna be truly good, right?

Well, needless to say, my calf did not like running 2 hours when it was already hurt, and I strained my soleus muscle badly. It would take me months to get better, and had I not discovered e-stim, I’m not sure I would have ever gotten over it. Regardless, I lost most of the rest of the year and started a vicious cycle that to this day I have not broken. When I finally was able to come back, I tried to come back too fast and too hard and just got another injury, over and over and over again. Sure there have been a few times since then that I’ve managed to put together a few months of training and even a few ok races, but I’ve never been able to put together a year or more of consistent training since. As a result, I’ve never returned to the level I was once at.

Anyway, I hope I haven’t bored everyone too much with this series of posts. I may or may not do one more after this one, which if I do would be sort of a “what have I learned” post. I might post some of my best training weeks and/or races at some point too. It’s actually been good for me to look back on everything. It’s helped with motivation and I think I have learned some things. Who knows whether or not I can ever get back to a point where I can run PR’s again, but like I said before, from here on out I want to approach things from a “old enough to know better but young enough to still do something about it” perspective. That’s all I can do.