A lot, and I mean a LOT, has happened in the last year and a half. I don’t even know where to start.

The initial idea behind this blog was to document my putative quest to run the Great Lakes Marathon Series. While a laudable goal, this turned out to be, ahh, not exactly practical, mostly because I don’t seem to be built to handle a marathon. I tried multiple times to train for one, and every time I ended up hurt, and it made me hate running for awhile. My goal was revised in 2018 to just run one marathon and get it off the bucket list.

Well, guess what? I did it. But it didn’t go at all like I had planned it.

I should mention here that I had a marriage fall apart last spring. It was difficult, as these things tend to be. In the immediate aftermath, I decided that I needed something to occupy my time and thoughts; something I could cling to as a goal to keep myself grounded, and to channel all of the negative things I was feeling into some sort of positive outcome. Marathon training seemed to fit the bill, and in order to force myself to stick with it I headed off to the local Running Room and joined a training group.

This worked. For a while, anyway.

Unfortunately, I started having ankle and calf problems about two-thirds of the way through training. This led to me eventually having to take a month off training, and although I was able to get a few 20+ mile long runs in, I wasn’t ready. Plus, I was still nicked up with little niggling things, pretty much all the time. I grew to hate having to go down a flight of stairs, because I couldn’t do it without pain in various parts of my legs. Oh, and there was the long training run I did where I ended up severely dehydrated and could not drive home… but more about that later.

Anyway, training was miserable and so was the race (report to follow where I deconstruct the experience in all its hideousness) and so was my life, pretty much. I haven’t been able to bring myself to write about all this until now. Good news is, I’m a lot better, and I have some new plans, including a seven continents half-marathon series that I will be doing in the next few years. One foot in front of the other, as they say.