Daily Note

I’ve never been “good” at cross country, confident on the course, or able to lock into a race the same way I can for track races- particularly outdoors. This summer of training was pretty typical, not too different from any other summer, but my goal was to take it easier than previous summers. I think I was able to do that for the most part. Some of the most fun I had over the summer was the weekend at Ben’s lake house in Vermont. I drove up from Lancaster and picked up Bak and Will on the way. It was a short visit but we all had a fantastic time getting whipped around on tubes by Doug Soder and finding some SERIOUS hills up around Ludlow. We came home on a Sunday night and by Tuesday morning I was in the hospital with appendicitis, with ten days left before preseason. The surgeon said to take a four-week break from running but truthfully, I dispelled that suggestion as soon as I heard it. Four weeks is a death sentence and I was dealing with the shock of the operation and the notion that my last cross country season was already behind me. I spun for a few days and increased mileage by two miles daily so that I could do base runs with the team a few days into preseason. This season, I tried to strike the right balance between working hard and working smart, but ultimately I was fizzling a bit at the end and got my lungs wrecked at the Regional race. But I came out of the season with a 25:38 PR at Conn College (I know XC personal records don’t *really* matter, but in lieu of any impressive placings, I’ll take the 25:38 as my crowning achievement) and that’s something.

The track season was yet again a grind, and while I did have a 8:46 3k in the Kline and a 15:11 5k at the Armory to my credit, I think Alex said it best when he told me “you ran that 10k the way you did because you didn’t overtrain during the indoor season.” That’s true. Even though outdoor season was too short, I’ll never forget running at Penn Relays or winning the (unseeded) 10k at Bucknell. That 30:58 was likely the best race I’ve ever run. It wasn’t a championship race, and the victory wasn’t sweetened for any personal reasons (like outkicking Eli Howard in the Little 3 5k freshman year) but all in all it was THE race that my body is made for. We ran 75-second laps for the first 7200m like clockwork. The pace whittled down the pack to three guys and I had the best kick of anyone there. Closing in 63 felt goooooooood. It’s also a rare day that I have a kick, so when I do it’s pretty shocking. I wasn’t happy that I didn’t PR in the 5k this season like I hoped, but because I probably would have had I run it at Bucknell I think I can chalk it up to the choice of races I ran. The Conference 5k was the grindiest race I’ve run well in, especially after the mishap of a 10k. My poor performance at Last Chance (sorry, Final Qualifier) was the culmination of 18 miles of racing in the three weeks prior and abandoning any sense of a schedule after I finished my finals five days before the race. But in the end, I left college with a 5k time that starts with 14, an 8k time that starts with 25, and a 10k time that starts with 30. I’m proud of that. Through all of the failures I’ve had , through all of the training mistakes and poor race performances I’ve had some gems. They keep me going.
It’s weird being done with college. It’s weird being done with school (?). It’s weird to not be on a team anymore and for running to be a hobby instead of, well, maybe Division III running is a hobby but it feels like more of a campus job. But I don’t have a real job yet and I’m just kind of hanging out. I’ve heard that graduating doesn’t hit you until August when you feel like you should be getting ready for preseason but then you aren’t. So we’ll see what I feel like in a few months.

To the team, I feel like sometimes I can get frustrated, there are days when the last thing I want to do is run Shirley Temple (ha) and when practice just isn’t the mental break that I so badly need. But while it may not seem like it when I get pissy I absolutely love this team. There’s no better group of people I’ve had the privilege of being a part of and it’s probably impossible to express the gratitude that I feel towards all of you. Whether it’s on the CVRT or the *whispers* elevated surface, it’s such a pleasure to be able to look back at the experiences I’ve had each of you and all of you because when I do that I know I’m part of something special. The journey truly is the reward. You don’t realize it when you’re a freshman logging miles alone the summer before you meet the team. You don’t realize it when you’re doing Ocker Hill workouts or when Odin is up next in pillar and the last thing you want to do is mountain climbers. But I realized it yesterday. It is drilled into us for four years but when it finally becomes true for us we can finally identify with the quote.
Boys, thank you for sharing all the miles with me. Coach Nichter, thank you for leading this wonderful community. I can’t wait to see you all again soon- the journey is never over.

STATS: My journey at Dickinson has taken me more than halfway around the world, longer than any commercial flight. I’m certainly not the only one to run this distance, and probably haven’t traveled as far as many, but I’ve been logging the time of each run since the beginning of 2016- to calculate everything, I ballparked an average of 6:50 pace for all of my DCXC running between June 9, 2015 and December 31, 2015. In total, I’ve run 11,909 miles, which took 56d, 12h, 9m, 36s. I cross-trained 829 miles, which took 6d, 4h, 10m, 0s. In total, that’s 12,738 training miles, which took 62d, 16h, 9m, 36s. It’s been a hell of a ride.

p.s. 5mi same route as yesterday but stopped at mccaskey's practice for a minute