About, by committee

Since it's been so long since I've blogged specifically about running, a fair number of the people who manage to find this place may know little about me. Rather than produce a brand-new set of facts and suppositions about myself, I've opted to post things I wrote about me at various life stages for various purposes. This mini-bio comes, I believe, from the middle of 2001.

When I was about seven, I jogged a quarter mile around the block with my mother. This was during the running boom of the mid-1970's and my mom - her copy of Dr. Kenneth Cooper's "Aerobics" stashed somewhere in the house - was temporarily aboard.

When I was in fourth grade I ran, for the first time, the 600 yards that was part of the Presidential Physical Fitness Test. I got a cramp and had to stop and walk. (At some future point I scored well enough in all six events to earn a badge.)

By the time I was fourteen I had played organized soccer and was occasionally in shape. I might say I was a runner in inclination and inspiration even if I was not a particularly gifted one: I usually finished at or near the top of the gym class in events like the 600 yards and the 1 1/2 mile run not because I was intrinsically fast, but because I was one of the few who took these endeavors seriously.

When I was a freshman at Concord (N.H.) High School, my mother somehow badgered me into running cross-country. Since I'd never heard of the non-skiing version of this activity, I in turn badgered my best friend at the time, a weed-smoking bicycle-motocross fanatic, into joining the team as well. We were the only two freshmen on the CHS contingent and he kicked my ass soundly in every race that year. I ran our 5K time trial in 22:00 and change even though I accidentally cut the course, then made my official debut in 21:06. By the end if the season I had whittled my time on our home course down to 19:31, but still had no clue how to race.

Sometime over the winter I decided I could be serious about this sport. As a pure numbers game and fundamentally solitary pursuit it suited my personality and mindset perfectly. I trained quite hard (for a ninth-grader) during the spring and ran a 4:56 for 1600 meters. By this time running as a sport had begun to enrich my social life and self-esteem and as a mode of exercise it even threatened to keep me sane.

I continued training diligently over the summer and when my sophomore season of cross-country began I suddenly found myself second on a strong squad. (My weed-smoking bicycle-motocross fanatic friend would run four years of cross-country and co-captain the team as a senior, but he never beat me after our freshman year.) Late in the fall I suffered a broken foot (evidently from playing basketball) and wasn't able to start training for track until mid-February; it would be years before an injury would shelve me for that long again. That spring I eked out a 4:43 for the 1600, qualifying for the New Hampshire Class L State Meet, and a 10:32 3200; I had yet to fully endorse the latter as "my event."

By the midpoint of my junior year of cross-country I had broken into the high 16's and was running third on a team favored to sweep the Class L Championship. Unfortunately we folded badly and wound up second. Sometimes I think about this when I'm out running and it still bugs the shit out of me. Anyway, on the heels of this debacle I ran indoor track for the first time, running a 9:32 3000 but failing to distinguish myself to any appreciable degree. I had begun lifting weights, and whether it was this, simple physical maturity, or my continued 40-50 miles a week of running, I broke into relative prominence that spring by finishing a surprise second in the Class L 3200 and third (9:50) in the statewide Meet of Champions.

That summer I pushed my personal envelope, ratcheting up my mileage to around 55-60 a week. The results paid off in the fall as I traded wins with my teammate Chris Basha, a talented junior who would shatter the state 1600 record that spring with a 4:15.5. Although we, now a quietly powerful underdog come a cropper by season's end, once again fell to Pinkerton Academy in the Class L's, we took top honors and a measure of satisfaction at the Meet of Champions. That winter I finished second in the 3000 at the State Meet (9:13.3) and in the spring lowered my 3200 time to 9:43. I'd had a satisfying if unspectacular high-school career.

I attended the University of Vermont, where I initially improved a fair amount, dropping my 3000-meter time to 8:56 in one of my first races as a frosh. However, amid numerous all-nighters, a poor diet, and overly enthusiastic consumption of fermented beverages, it wasn't long before the wheels fell off. I'd train like an animal for a few weeks, run a lackluster race, and slip into the locker-room shadows. After one abysmal indoor 3000 during my junior year, I stepped off the track and never finished another collegiate race.

Between 1992 and 1994 I ran sporadically and did not compete. In the spring of '94, I was living in Atlanta and working at a running-shoe store, waiting to start grad school the following year. With ample time to train and renewed motivation, I experimented with 90- and 100-mile weeks for the first time. On Labor Day, I wound up setting a 5K road PR (15:25) that stood for almost seven years and ran my first marathon on Thanksgiving Day in a marginally satisfactory 2:39:37. I was 24 years old; I immediately decided 2:30:00 was in my near future and that I could possibly qualify for the Olympic Trials Marathon one day.

Back in New England in 1995 my running was up and down. After a 525-mile January, I incurred my one and only stress fracture in the spring, but after regrouping in the Texas heat that summer I went on to run 2:33:08 at the Baystate Marathon (an event which, along with the accompanying half-marathon, has treated me extraordinarily well over the years) in October. The key, I think, was experimenting with MP (marathon pace) runs of 15K and longer for the first time. I set my sights on a sub-2:30:00 at the 100th Boston Marathon in April 1996, but underwent a protracted, mellow collapse starting at about 17 miles and fell far short, running 2:36:11. I was sore for two weeks afterward and as a piss-poor downhill runner I swore I would never return to this evilly configured, overpriced and overballyhooed event.

I found myself back in Concord in the spring of '97 and undertook what was then my best spate of training to date. A PR 32:03 road 10K late in the summer and a 48:27 15K track time trial in the early part of fall suggested a sub-2:30:00 was in the offing. Returning to Baystate, I indeed held 2:27:00 pace through 22 miles but bonked like you read about and faded to a 2:30:52, losing the top spot to a guy noted for racing with a Walkman and wearing only a Speedo. ESPN caught the whole sordid affair on tape for its show, "Running and Racing."

In January 1998 I joined the Central Mass Striders, a club with a bucketful of runners faster than me. This added a degree of focus and purpose to my training and racing and automatcially furnished me with a bevy of new (if occasional) training partners. I didn't accomplish much that year, running two marathons (Fred's and Hartford) six months and eight seconds apart - 2:33:34 and 2:33:26. The marathon was getting old. I did manage a five-mile PR that fall (25:26), but 1998 was an otherwise unspectacular campaign.

I resolved to take another serious crack at the marathon in the fall of 1999, by which time I had begun writing for Running Times Magazine. By then I had adopted the idea that more was definitely better, in the long term if not always in the short term, and that training plans, insofar as the marathon was concerned, really needed to span not weeks or even monrhs, but years. Having taken scads of biology, biochemistry and physiology courses and having been an avid reader of exercise physiology for years, I decided it made more sense to pattern my methods after those of the all-time greats rather than try to apply the interesting but otherwise meaningless findings of a bunch of non-coaching lab rats to my training. I endured a string of poor races in the summer but regrouped to notch a 2:26:52 marathon in October, again at Baystate. This was gratifying in its own right but also lent credence to the idea of an eventual sub-2:22:00, the time needed to get into the Trials, and also validated the idea that responding to "failures" by resting briefly, then running more than before was on target. I had also begun coaching Bishop Brady High School's cross-country team, an extremely gratifying endeavor I would continue for two years.

In 2000 I raced sparingly and weathered a period of weakness that was ultimately ascribed to iron deficiency, a marathoner's occupational hazard. By this point in my career 100-mile weeks were de rigeur, even while working full-time. My best race of the year was a 1:08:29 half-marathon in October - a PR by 2 1/2 minutes and one again run on my favorite course at Baystate - and I also popped a rather random 8:44.3 3000 just before Christmas, a decent track time for this glycolytic-muscle-fiber-deprived road hog.

After the New Year, I weathered a dandy case of the flu, then focused my energy on a return to Boston, elevating my training to a new level. I averaged between 105 and 110 miles a week for almost three months (reaching a one-week high of 145), included some long races and long tempo runs, and wound up with a 2:24:17 at Boston in spite of a very necessary Port-a-Let stop at 22 miles that cost me an indeterminate amount of time and coliform bacteria. I recovered well enough to run a 31:44 10K thirteen days later and a 15:22 5K three days after that; I had thus set three PR's in three races in a seventeen-day span. The honeymoon ended in the form of an injured hip not long after that, but by the summer of 2001 I had set my training sights firmly on a sub-2:22:00 in 2002, when the 2004 Trials qualifying window would be open.