Brendan Runs Marathons

The past week was important for people for different reasons. Mardi Gras was on Tuesday, and Lent started on Wednesday. Valentine's Day was Wednesday. The Lunar New Year was Friday. None of these events were tremendously significant for me, although I am a single, non-religious Chinese-American millennial. Actually, I take Chinese New Years pretty seriously, but that's not the point.  This week marked the highest mileage I have set in a calendar week (I use Monday as my initial marker rather than Sunday) in my life. I ran 60.5 miles and actually managed to take one day off. No doubles. Before I delve into the details of my 60+ mileage week, I will share another bit of news as this is a blog dedicated to my life as a graduate student as well as a runner. This week, I planned and designed my first MBE (molecular beam epitaxy) growth. Certainly an infinitesimal fraction of the population has ever heard about molecular beam epitaxy, but as a first-year graduate student, this was a ...

Of all of the 50+ mile weeks I have ran in the past 2 years, most of them have actually been in the month of February. I think that's kind of crazy considering how icy and cold it gets in Illinois during the second month of the year. In fact, for a good portion of the 16 miles I ran this past Friday, a lot of them were spent dodging icy patches east of campus in Urbana. One of my resolutions this past year was to run more efficient miles on less volume, so knocking out 52.07 miles in the second week of February really doesn't seem to follow that plan. In my defense, this has got to be the most rested and recovered I have ever felt during a 50+ mile week. The easy treadmill running between 7:30 and 7:50 pace has dominated a large portion of my mileage and has allowed me to get good quality recovery miles with low impact to mitigate any chance of injury early in the season. Also, I've been getting a lot of sleep this week (minus having to get up before 5 AM for my long run th...