High Five By 55

I always forgot, yet it always happens. To me, there's one true sign that I'm deep in marathon training. That sign, I have heavy legs for every single run. The intensity and volume just keep piling on top of one another. And the legs feel heavy day after day after day. But that's not the sign. That's just a product of the training cycle of hard and/or fast run, then long recovery. The real sign is that while the legs are heavy, it doesn't matter. A run starts out with a thought like "no way I can do what's planned today on these heavy legs." The thought somewhere during the run is more like "hey, this is going totally fine despite the heavy legs." It's just heavy legs. The heartrate is where it's expected. The rate of perceived exertion is on point. It's just heavy legs. Layers and layers and layers of training not every quite allowing the legs to fully recovery. Always just enough recovery to be able to do the next workout well. ...

I spent the past weekend in Madison, Wisconsin. I make an annual pilgrimage to the University Of Wisconsin to spend some time with my mother, bring the kids to the old college stomping grounds, attend a Wisconsin Badger football game, and basically revel in bits of nostalgia and memories of likely the most formative adult years of my life. My running hobby also has its roots in Madison. My journey to becoming a regular runner was a long and arduous one over more than a decade with many fits and starts. That first stab at running was while a student at the University of Wisconsin. I had put on a lot of college weight once cut from the college soccer team early in my freshman year. In my final semester, I decided to do something about it and took up running. Short runs from my apartment along Lakeshore Path on the shores of Lake Mendota. It didn't stick long, maybe a couple months. I didn't run far, perhaps 5 miles at most. These were the very early days of GPS watches and I didn...