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...

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...

2017 was an interesting year. I graduated from Illinois with my B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering, lived in California for three months to work at an industrial tech giant, and started graduate school in Electrical Engineering at Illinois. There was a lot of fun in the last year including a bunch of traveling. I really learned a lot in the last year, particularly in the last four months. The past four months also have been quite humbling; graduate school is no joke. There have been also a handful of times this past semester where I've told myself, "holy crap, I ran 26.2 miles in less than the running time of The Titanic ."  That's where the running and non-running related events start to intersect. Aside from finishing my undergrad, working at Intel as a summer intern, and embarking on my quest for a PhD, I managed to run a half marathon in the Spring and three full marathons in the second half of the year. Concluding my running on the final day of 2017 wit...