Brendan Runs Marathons

158.93 miles for January of this year. At this point last year, I was at 110.43 miles. I guess I'm really not following through with my resolution of reduced mileage; however, an overwhelming chunk of my mileage has been comfortable easy runs on a treadmill at my local gym. I am currently dealing with some piriformis inflammation on my right side, which I think stems from my accidental 16.6 miles this past weekend. Let me backtrack to this past weekend. This past Saturday, it was about 48 degrees at about 8:45 AM. Keep in mind, this is the heart of wintertime in Central Illinois. It is literally January. This is one of the first times I had to plan a marathon training long run with a running partner. I have been living in the Champaign-Urbana area for over 4 and a half years, yet somehow I still managed to miss a turn which caused me to lengthen my run. A supposed 12 mile run turned into 15.6. My running buddy and I kept anticipating a turn onto a street that was never going ...

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, I have been pretty used to the inconsistency of the weather in the winter. At the beginning of last week, there were more days where the wind chill was below 0 degrees than not. Now I'm gearing up for a 12 miler tomorrow where the high is predicted to be above 50 degrees. Unpredictability is not unusual; it's the norm. To work around the bitter cold in the beginning and middle of January, I moved over mainly to indoor workouts on indoor tracks and treadmills. I was never a believer of treadmills, but I will say, it has really grown on me quite a bit. The obvious key to high volume training is a lot of mileage. Obviously high volume has a variety of meanings depending on who you are talking about. If you're a professional athlete, high volume means 110-120 miles a week. For a working parent with kids, high volume could be 25 miles. For me at this point in my life as a grad student early on in the path of a PhD, (safe) high volume ranges b...

There have been two weeks in this new calendar year. In that brief amount of time, Illinois has experienced subzero temperatures which have made outdoor running inherently difficult and dangerous. Just this week, I went on a 5.43 mile run that followed the same loop five times around suburban streets around Urbana to avoid any ice. I did happen to fall once on that run! I guess what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Weirdly enough too, there was a lot of fog this past week as well. Illinois weather is weird... Within the first week of the year, I managed to get food poisoning, which pretty much rendered me useless as a graduate research assistant as well as a runner for more than half a week. It was my first time having food poisoning, and boy, I would not recommend it to anybody. As a runner, we all fear sickness. It brings us down from our good health and forces us to stay in bed while blank days in our running calendar accumulate. I think it's important to reco...