Mike McKeeman's Journal

April 2, 2008 Entry (posted April 3, 2008)

Normally I type really quickly, sometimes so fast that people think I’m fake typing because it sounds like I’m just banging the keys nonsensically. But today I’m pecking at the keys with only one finger and it’s taking forever. Why would someone who can type so fast only use one hand? I think the answer to that question is obvious…because my left arm doesn’t bend in the direction necessary to reach the keyboard ever since I broke my elbow four days ago.

How does one break an elbow? I don’t remember all the details, but it did involve an eight-pound medicine ball, Ian, a volleyball, an 18-inch high box, Steve, free burritos, and a basketball court. When it first happened we searched for some ice, but we couldn’t find any. Fortunately there is still a lot of snow here, so that worked just as well.

People thought I was faking at first, but a day later I still couldn’t bend my arm in any direction. It was just frozen at a 90-degree angle. Steve decided that the best way to figure out if anything was broken was to put my cell phone on vibrate, place it on my elbow, and then wait for him to call me. If it hurt, it was broken. That idea was quickly vetoed, although not as quickly as his theory that I just needed to let him pull on my arm really hard and straighten it out. I opted instead for the emergency room.

That was three days ago and running during that time has been interesting. Training had been going pretty well before this incident, and I really haven’t missed too much since it happened. Deena is preparing for the women’s Olympic Trials marathon in Boston on April 20, and I am getting ready for the Broad Street 10 Miler on May 4.

I think the most important thing you should take from my story is a newfound appreciation for arm movement. If you ever start to doubt the importance of swinging your arms while running, have someone smash your elbow with a hammer. Then try to run 6 x mile at altitude with Deena. The importance of arm movement in running will instantly become very clear.

Typically I apologize for my blogs being too long, but this time it will be the opposite. Today I will have to cut it short because the slow one fingered typing is driving me crazy...

December 2007 Entry (posted December 4, 2007)

Is it 2008 yet?  I’m tired of 2007.  On Monday when I started running again after a three-week break, I opened a 2008 calendar and started the year early.  Today was January 4 in my world.  There was a funny cartoon with an elephant on the calendar.  Talking elephants are always funny.  So if you see me celebrating St Patrick’s Day in a few months when everyone else is claiming it’s February, now you’ll know why.  But let’s rewind..

After an unsuccessful spring racing season I returned to Mammoth Lakes in mid-July.  Mammoth during the summer is one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever visited.  Unfortunately I was really out of shape so I wasn’t really able to take in any of the breathtaking views on our runs.  I was too busy focusing on more basic things…like moving my legs.  And breathing.  The altitude seemed to be affecting me way more than normal.  I made a mental note to never show up in Mammoth this out of shape ever again.

It didn’t help that I was meeting up with Dan Browne and Josh Cox for most of my runs.  They were hammering me, except for the day when we dropped Josh by so much that we started to wonder if he had seen the pine cone arrows we had constructed on the ground so he would know which turns to make on the maze of dirt roads near Lookout Mountain.

Luckily Dan and Josh then went to San Diego for a few weeks, so I was able to do some runs on my own.  Normally I don’t like running by myself, but at this point in my training I really needed it.  About a week later Ryan returned from Europe.  Most of our group was still in Europe or Japan, and Meb was away for a few weeks running various road races across the U.S.

For a few weeks it was just Ryan and I.  It was a much different experience than usual for us.  The group has a strong team environment, so not having an array of teammates and coaches at practice every day was strange.  There were definitely some days when Ryan and I struggled to stay motivated.  Other days we had to invent really boring runs where we kept coming past the same spot so we could get water.

We did, however, have company on several occasions.  Ryan’s high school coach came out to watch us during a few workouts and that was a tremendous help.  If our schedules matched up, we would meet with some of the college teams training in Mammoth during early August.  There were large groups of athletes from both Princeton University and Malone College.  Like us, they were very dedicated to their training.  Even on days when we didn’t run with anyone, we would meet up at the creek for a post-workout ice bath.  Eventually the rest of our teammates returned and it was back to the norm.

During a large portion of my time in Mammoth I was living with Dan and Josh.  Living with Dan and Josh was never boring.  They are two of the most entertaining people I have ever met, especially when they are together.  Most of our time was spent with someone making fun of someone else, usually for something ridiculous and inane.

Our favorite topic of conversation was Dan’s jacket.  Dan has this jacket that is so bright yellow that it can be seen from space.  I’m pretty sure it glows, and the energy generated by that glowing could power a medium sized city for a month.  When Dan wore the jacket Josh and I would pretend that we didn’t know he was there even though we were being blinded by the jacket.  An endless stream of asking “where’s Dan?” or “why didn’t Dan come to the run today?” or “those look like Dan’s legs, but where’s his upper body?” would follow.  For some reason this never stopped being funny.

My training was subpar through August and into September.  I was really discouraged.  One day we ran the Mammoth Rock Trail and I got to the highest point in the run feeling like I couldn’t run another step.  It was probably my 87th consecutive bad run.  I started yelling at the rock and scared this really fast chipmunk.  The rock was not intimidated.  It’s pretty big.  At that moment I decided I was quitting and going home.  Things were just not going to work out for me this fall.

The next day I had a great workout.  Running is weird.  Finally things started going well on a daily basis.  My intervals, tempos, and longs runs were better than the workouts I ran leading up to my marathon PR last fall.  The final 5-6 weeks of hard training were great, and my confidence was high as I boarded a plane to return to the east coast for a few weeks before the Olympic Trials.

There are various theories on how many days you should give yourself to adjust to a change in time when traveling.  Most people believe that you should allow one day for every one hour time difference.  I believe in a more radical theory…one week for every one hour.  So I returned home for the last three weeks of training.  There I would be able to adjust to the time change and allow my body to recover at sea level from the previous months’ training.  As usual, my first few days were not good.  My runs were especially bad on the humid days since I was used to the dry weather in Mammoth.  But I wasn’t too worried.  My taper last year was also terrible and I raced well.

A week before the race I started to worry.  That’s when I got really sick.  I barely ran from that point until the morning of the race, but I still felt like I might be able to put together a good race.  During this week I learned that people will tell you the most ridiculous things the last few days before a marathon.  Everything you tell them is great.  Being sick is great because it will force you to get a lot of rest.  Having bad runs is great because your body is saving up for one good run at the end of the week.  Everything is great.

The morning of the race I didn’t feel so great.  From the start I felt like I was running way too hard for the splits I was seeing on my watch and for my position in the elite field.  I wanted to drop out so many times, but I just couldn’t make myself walk off the course.  I ended up running 2:26 and finishing 73rd.  I was extremely disappointed with the result.  People kept telling me that it was good that I finished and that just finishing when a high number of runners dropped out is a great accomplishment, but just finishing is not why I run.  I run to do my best, and this was not my best.

While my race was not great, the atmosphere in the city and in Central Park was.  The New York Road Runners did a fabulous job of putting the race together.  When we lined up to start it was still dark out but there was a huge crowd lining the street.  People were really fired up for the race, especially all the Brian Sell fans.  In the first mile of the race we turned a corner and ran into Times Square.  It was still lit up so that was a very impressive view.  I wish I had a good photo of the pack coming into there.

Once we came into Central Park there were thousands of people lining the course.  Barely any stretches of the loop were empty.  I was not running well, but running on that course with all of those people was quite exciting.  I thought the course was challenging, but fair.  If you trained right and ran smart, you could run fast.  Having trained so much in Mammoth no one hill on the course seemed all that intimidating, but the cumulative effect of all the hills made the last five miles excruciating.

When I finished the race I was extremely happy to see my teammate Ryan Hall posing for pictures with an American flag draped around his body.  Ryan worked really hard this year to accomplish his goal of making an Olympic team, and he deserves all of his success.  Sadly I soon heard the news on the death of Ryan Shay during the race.  Even today, nearly a month later, it hardly seems possible.

Ryan was the first person I met when I came to Mammoth Lakes in 2005.  I had heard plenty about how intense he was in workouts, so I was expecting a similar intensity out of him in a non-running capacity.  Instead I encountered a guy who was laid back, funny, and willing to help me out since I was the new guy.  It was a stark comparison to his running personality.  We lived together for about three weeks before he left to run the Boston Marathon.

I didn’t see him very much until the following winter when we lived together in Woodside, CA.  There were seven of us living in the house, but mostly I hung out with Ryan and Alicia.  From the day I arrived the two of them were inseparable.  When I went to bed they were talking in the kitchen.  When I woke up they were talking in the kitchen, sitting in the exact same spot.  I started to think they never slept.  It was funny because they both refused to admit that they had feelings for each other, even though the rest of us saw it so clearly.

Later that year we spent some time in Leuven, Belgium.  Ryan and I would sometimes go out for a few beers because neither of us was racing.  I was training with Deena and he was there with Alicia.  After that summer Ryan started training in Flagstaff so I would just see him at races.  It was good to get back together with him in the days leading up to the race.

The morning before the race I ran with Ryan, as well as Alicia, Deena, and Halls, and some friends from Philadelphia.  As usual, Ryan was way out in front of us, wondering why were we going so slowly.  That afternoon I sat next to Ryan on the bus back to the hotel from the technical meeting.  We joked about Family Guy and some funny signs we saw along First Avenue.  A bus took the athletes to Rockefeller Center the morning of the race.  There was a room downstairs where we could stretch and relax.  Ryan sat down on the floor next to me and referenced something that had happened in Woodside.  That was the last time I ever spoke to him.

I will miss Ryan, and as others have said before me, I hope that in 2008 I can strive to work as hard as he did.  His dedication to his craft was truly motivating.

So…once again I must apologize for going on for so long.  I think I was born without the part of your brain that allows you to summarize things..

Summer 2007 Entry (posted August 14, 2007)

After running so well to close out 2006, I was really looking forward to running even faster in 2007. Deena was also looking forward to 2007, having started the year in mid-November. I arrived back in Mammoth Lakes in early January. Early on, Deena looked much better than during the previous fall’s training. I was feeling pretty good as well, hammering out long runs and tempos throughout a fairly mild winter on the mountain.

Deena was preparing for the Boston Marathon, but I had no plans to join her on the line. I wanted to use the marathon training as a base for some late spring track meets and road races. Deena and Terrence had other ideas, concocting scheme after scheme to force me into running Boston, including one where they sent in an entry with all my information.

I had never watched Deena run cross country in person before, so it was great to see her win the U.S. Cross Country Championships in Boulder. About a month later we traveled to Jacksonville for the U.S. 15K Championships. My training had been going well and I was confident I could run a good time and beat some good runners. But instead I ran like crap. It was a bad race. I wish I could blame it on the fact that the Maxwell House coffee factory makes the whole town, particularly our downwind hotel, smell like stale coffee grounds, but I can’t.

After a few more weeks of training in Mammoth, we ventured down to San Diego for some runs at sea level. We rented this big house which looked even bigger because it was unfurnished except for a large ping pong table in the dining room. I had a good time in southern California, other than the day when Deena and Terrence tricked me into a 25 mile long run. There wasn’t a lot of happiness that day.

Finally we made it to Boston for the marathon, which I watched on TV. Deena had a rough day but still did win the U.S. Marathon Championships. I definitely like being in the race more than watching it on TV. I thought running the 2006 Flora London Marathon was stressful, but when I’m in the race I’m closer to the action and I can tell how things are going. Watching it on TV you don’t have too much of a feeling for whether someone is having a good day or a bad day. Plus, Deena’s Mom gets really stressed out and then transfers her stress to you. I think it’s some kind of super power.

Having survived marathon training, I had a few weeks to work on some speed before setting my sights on a steeplechase at the Penn Relays and then the Broad Street 10-Mile race. Both went terribly. The whole season just seemed to come crashing down pretty quickly so I just took a break. Looking back on it, I should’ve just run the marathon. I think once my body went through the training leading up to Boston it thought I was going to run the marathon. And when your body thinks you’re supposed to be running a marathon then it also expects to get a break afterwards. So once we got through Boston my body just said “that’s it. I’m done,” and went on vacation without me.

After taking a break for a few weeks, I started back running. It was hard at first because I felt really out of shape. I was also completely unmotivated for some reason. I felt like my next marathon was so far off that I had no direction.

And so, lacking motivation, I did what any perfectly sane person would do…I got on a plane without having any idea where I was going. You probably think that’s impossible and that only an idiot could get on a plane without knowing where the plane was going. And you may be right. But on the other hand I have one question to ask…do you know where Knock is?

When I checked in, the destination printed on my ticket and boarding pass was “Knock.” I didn’t know whether it was an airport abbreviation, country, city, island, person, dog, or sound. I didn’t even know which direction we were flying. It wasn’t until we landed in Iceland to refuel and they said it would only be another 45 minutes that I figured out that our destination was Ireland.

This was great news. I’m Irish, I like to drive by endless rows of sheep, and I’d packed my only green t-shirt. On the other hand, I’d also packed my baseball glove, thinking we were going to a baseball game in Milwaukee. And with that bit of information we have probably reached the part of the story where I should back up.

My friends who planned the trip and refused to tell me where we were going had “accidentally” slipped and mentioned that one of our destinations on a multiple destination trip was Milwaukee. Figuring that they had no reason to lie, I prepared for baseball. And so wearing a Brewers t-shirt and holding my glove, I landed in Ireland. My first thought upon getting off the plane…”it’s going to be a long trip back to Milwaukee for the weekend.”

Six days later I was still in Ireland, but it had only taken me 3 days to figure out we weren’t going back to Milwaukee. We then boarded a plane for Edinburgh, Scotland, where we ran in Holyrood Park, site of the 2008 World Cross Country championships. If you love cross country and you love old cities, I would definitely recommend taking a trip to Edinburgh around the time of the big meet.

And so after returning from my non-Milwaukee journey, it was time to get serious. Time to start training. Time to get back to Mammoth Lakes.

March 2007 Entry (posted March 30, 2007)

I know this happened a while ago, but I’m going to talk about the 2006 Philadelphia Marathon because it’s probably way more exciting then my awful trip to Jacksonville last week, my stunning loss to Gabe in ping pong the other day, or the terrible music playing in the Looney Bean Coffee Shop in Mammoth Lakes right now. I don’t like banjos.

I arrived in Mammoth last August fresh off a bizarre summer of training in Belgium. My workouts had all been focused toward an 800-meter race against Terrence Mahon (Team Running USA coach), Brad Yewer (of Flynn Sports Management), and Andrew Kastor (Deena’s husband). In Belgium they actually invented a new word to describe this race. I forget what it is, but loosely translated it means “slow guys trying to run fast over a short distance.” After six weeks of running only 200-meter and 400-meter repeats, shifting back into marathon training was hard.

Deena was still slightly injured, so I was able to make a slow transition back into high mileage and long tempo runs. Eventually she was able to get back into a full training schedule and we started having some intense weeks of training. After a few weeks, things really started coming around. During September and October I had my best eight weeks of training ever. Of all time. Ever. I was extremely focused on my goal of winning the Philadelphia Marathon.

The excitement about my training was bittersweet, though, as things were really going well for me, but some nagging injuries were preventing Deena from running at 100 percent. It was hard to see her struggling because she had always looked nearly invincible during my other stints training with her.

Deena, Andrew, and I traveled to Philadelphia about two weeks before the ING NYC Marathon. We stayed there until a few days before the race and ran on some great trails at Valley Forge and along the Wissahickon Creek. It took me about a week to convince Andrew that New York was north of Philadelphia.

After traveling to New York to watch the ING New York City Marathon, I went back down to Philadelphia for my final two weeks of preparation for the race. At this point I started to feel terrible on all my runs. Everyone kept telling me it was just the effects of tapering so I decided to believe them, even if I didn’t really believe them. My friend Bob Schwelm, also the owner of the Bryn Mawr Running Company, was feeling the exact same way. He reassured me that all his best marathons had come after feeling terrible leading up to the race. A week before the marathon I went into the store and he asked me how I felt on my run. I told him I felt awful and he exclaimed “YES, me too. This is great.” I guess he was right, but it still seemed bizarre to be so excited about feeling horrendous.

Six days before the race I woke up and could barely move. My back was completely destroyed for some reason. Maybe it was stress. I don’t know exactly what it was, but I needed help. After making many phone calls, I secured an appointment with Dr Timothy Chow, a chiropractor in Lansdale. The week of the race I went to visit Dr Chow four times, and after each visit I felt better. By the morning of the race, I was completely pain free.

We had a perfect morning for a marathon. It was about 40 degrees with very little wind. I was confident in my training and I felt pretty good on my short warm up. Typically the winner of the Philadelphia Marathon runs around 2:20, so my original plan was to not worry about time and just try to win the race. This year the race directors had brought in an athlete with a 2:12 PR, so I knew winning would be much tougher than I had previously anticipated.

Also, the race had added a half-marathon that would start at the same time as the marathon and run essentially the same course. The race directors made no effort to help athletes distinguish between competitors in the marathon and half-marathon (I know because I asked them directly), so it would be nearly impossible to tell who you were actually competing against in the marathon until the half-marathon finished. With this knowledge I decided that my best plan would be to run 2:20 marathon pace for the first half of the race and then try to pick up the pace and catch anyone who was ahead of me.

I planned on going out too slow for the first mile rather than too fast. I ran what I thought was 5:30 effort, so I was excited that I hit 5:20 and not 5:30 like I was expecting. It was a way better feeling than when the opposite thing happened last spring in London, nearly causing me to stop at a bar for a few beers with some excited spectators instead of continuing.

I ran most of the first six miles by myself, running straight 5:20 pace while the pack around me was alternating between fast and slow miles. Finally at mile 6 they settled in to a more consistent pace, so I hung with them until they started slowing down going up the hill on mile 9. Now I was completely by myself. I could barely see anyone ahead of me, but I knew they were out there somewhere. The section of the course from miles 9-12 is fairly hilly and there aren’t many spectators. My pace was fine, but I started to feel tired and was second guessing my decision to pull away from the pack.

Once I got back to the river at mile 12 I instantly felt better. I passed halfway in 1:09:53, right where I wanted to be. Just before 14 miles I passed the start/finish area at the Philadelphia Art Museum. The crowds were huge and loud, and I started feeling really good again. My dad told me that I was in fifth place, but I couldn’t see any of the guys in front of me.

Running along the river toward Manayunk from miles 14-18 I was running 5:10 pace. Running faster is usually a good thing, but these splits kind of worried me. I’ve heard way too many stories about people who felt great in the middle of the race, ran too fast as a result, and then fell apart the last 10K. I made a conscious decision to slow down from 18-20 to ensure I would be ready for a fast final 10K and a sub-2:20 time.

I hit the brakes coming into Manayunk and ran a few 5:20s, which was hard because there was a long, straight stretch where I could see the guys ahead of me. I wanted to catch all of them. I got to 20 miles and quickly did the math in my head to figure out I would run 2:19 if I maintained 5:20 pace all the way in. I was still afraid of pushing too hard and fading at the end, but there was a downhill coming out of town and back toward the river. I could see two guys within striking distance. I caught them just after a 5:03 mile 21 and moved into third place.

At this point the runners heading out to mile 20 were on the other side of the road and started cheering me on. The further I got toward the finish, the thicker the crowd of runners was getting. It was amazing to see everyone so excited about how I was running. I barely knew any of these people and yet they were going crazy. At mile 23 I moved into second place. I still couldn’t see the leader but this was the first point when I thought I could break 2:18.

Passing mile 25 I realized that winning was out of the question, but I needed only a 5:25 to break 2:18. “Only,” however, is a relative term. Yes, 2 hours ago 5:25 would’ve been an “only.” If I was running downhill, 5:25 would be an “only.” If I built a time machine and brought myself forward in time from yesterday, 5:25 would be an “only.” But at this point my legs were burning and the last half mile is uphill. And this hill had been my nemesis in the past. Pretty much every race in Philadelphia finishes up it, and I’ve run really slow on that mile every single time. Some people claim there is really no hill there, but I will fight those people to the death.

Fortunately this time I had thousands of crazed spectators cheering me on, so I managed a 5:15 for a 2:17:50 final time and a second-place finish. It was probably the best race I’ve ever run, and I was really happy that it happened in Philadelphia. Just as important, the time qualified me for the Olympic Marathon Trials that will be held in New York during November 2007.

A large part of running a good marathon is luck, and I was very fortunate to run a race on such a perfect day with such an enthusiastic crowd. I was also fortunate to have such great coaching from Terrence for the months leading up to the race and to have the pleasure of training with Deena every day.

I know this got really long, so congratulations if you made it this far. I’m not good at keeping things short. The end.

Summer 2006 Entry (posted August 15, 2006)

After the Flora London Marathon I went home to Philadelphia. Home, however, was used in the loosest sense of the word, as I didn’t have an apartment, house, condo, or refrigerator box to sleep in, on, under, or around. All my meager worldly possessions were boxed up in someone’s basement. But I could be in Atlantic City in one hour and two minutes, so at least I could play poker to win money to pay the hypothetical rent on my non-existent residence.

A friend offered me a room in his house. I had a bed, a makeshift desk, and some drawers with no dresser surrounding them. Technically they were drawers, but in a more real sense they were simply bins with no lids, overflowing with Mizuno t-shirts while resting side by side on my floor. I had two human housemates and one annoying dog. Rupert had legs so skinny it looked like his body was being held up by four pens, and he would bark for exactly 37 consecutive minutes every morning at 7:04 am. When he barked, he would terrify himself with his own sound, then jump, turn (in mid-air), and go running from the room.

After two weeks without running, I made a pathetic and failed comeback attempt that lasted eight days. The marathon had not been kind to me. After another eight days off, I tried again. I still felt awful, but part of that was probably the 90 degree weather, part was probably the oppressive humidity, and part was probably the fact that I was usually running all out by the time I’d reached the end of the driveway. For some reason I was incapable of running slowly, even though running hard felt horrible. I would sense myself running too fast, tell myself to slow down, slow down for about eight seconds, and then find myself running fast again.

My training went on like this for about six weeks. Gradually I started to feel better, and even more gradually I began to reintroduce the concept of structured workouts into my week. While getting ready to help Deena prepare for some European track races, I realized that my turnover was much better than I had hoped for after a year of marathon training.

On July 1 I boarded a plane from Philadelphia to Brussels, where after a short train ride I would join my Team Running USA teammates at a small university in Leuven. Our floor of the on-campus building had about two rooms, each complete with a small kitchen and bathroom. There was a good side of the building and a bad side of the building, and I was fortunately on the good side. The good side was exactly like the bad side except that the good side was not as hot as the surface of the sun. Overall it was a spacious and cost effective way to spend a month in Europe, and I would definitely stay there again.

It was a five minute walk to the town square, which was composed of numerous cafes, restaurants, bars, and ice cream shops. We literally could’ve eaten somewhere different every day for the entire month. Each establishment had outdoor seating which we utilized during both the hot days and cool nights. It didn’t get dark until after 10 pm, so we often lost track of time sitting outside with a cold beer.

I tend to have immense difficulty running after traveling long distances, and this trip was no exception. Time changes absolutely kill me. For the first five days in Leuven I teetered between extreme awakeness and extreme tiredness, a process which left me so disoriented that I started using possibly fictitious words like “awakeness.” On most days I was still able to pull myself together enough to help Deena with a workout or to have her chastise me for swerving and falling into a patch of stinging bushes on the side of the trail.

While I was over in Europe, I went to watch several high-quality meets in places like Lucerne, Gent, Rome, Liege, and Huesden. It was exciting to see the best in the world compete week after week. The experience of watching a meet in Europe is drastically different from that of watching a meet in the U.S. Spectators in Europe are interested in every event, from the discus to the pole vault to the 10,000m. Track meets are also much more social. People sit in the stands for hours, chatting about the races and throwing back a plethora of delicious Hoegaarden beers.

One thing that struck me about the experience of athletes on the European track circuit is the constantly changing schedules. Sometimes athletes don’t know if they have been accepted into a meet until the day before the race. Plans change weekly, depending on how workouts are going or how the field of a particular race is shaping up. The athletes competing in these meets have to be very flexible. This was a big change from what I usually see while training with Deena for a major marathon. With the marathon, you make a decision, months in advance about which race you will run, and pretty much nothing can steer you away from that course.

Personally I like the lifestyle of marathon training better. I enjoy having a more familiar home base and I thrive off of consistent training and racing schedules. I wasn’t even racing in Europe and still the constant changes, lack of sleep, and brutal travel took its toll on my training. It definitely requires some adjusting before you can be successful in this environment.

I feel like this whole experience has taught me a lot about adaptation and going with the flow. But most importantly I learned that “slagroom” is the Flemish word for whipped cream, and that the way Ian pronounced it was definitely not correct because the girl at the ice cream counter laughed at him when he said it.

I’ve had a great time since London, both in Philadelphia and in Belgium, but I’m definitely looking forward to getting back to Mammoth Lakes for some intense marathon training which will culminate in Philadelphia this November.

Introductory Entry

I arrived in Oxnard on January 1, looking forward to escaping the horrid weather of Pennsylvania and enjoying some California sunshine. Sure enough, it was pouring rain. Deena and Andrew assured me that “this never happens,” although I questioned their truthfulness as the rain continued to “never happen” for the next 3 days.

Finally we made our way to Mammoth Lakes, where we were greeted by a severe blizzard. Again I was promised that this never happens, which is why it made perfect sense to me that it continued blizzarding for the next 10 days. I couldn’t tell if Deena and Andrew were huge liars or if I actually was causing strange weather anomalies. At first we struggled to get back into the training, but we quickly rounded into form.

On the day the blizzard stopped, we drove to the Bay Area. Our plan was to re-join the rest of Team Running USA in Woodside for about 6 weeks. I relished the thoughts of warm, sunny weather, as well as the alleged short track at Stanford. After driving through a town that permanently smells like garlic, we arrived in Woodside during a torrential rain storm. “I don’t understand. This never happens,” Alicia explained. I nodded in fake agreement.

During the next 6 weeks, training went really well. I was starting to become confident in my marathon ability. London would be my debut at the distance, and I now knew that I would be ready. I lived in a big, strange house with Ryan, Alicia, Ian, Kate, Laura, and Gabe. There was never a dull moment, as we engaged in discussions of world events, spoke of history and philosophy, watched countless episodes of Alias and Family Guy, and made fun of certain people in the house for eating too much butter.

The time in Woodside went quickly, and Deena, Andrew, and I eventually returned to Mammoth Lakes for one final month of altitude training. February had been mild, and so of course we returned to experience the most snowfall in the month of March that the town had ever seen. Of all time! Ever! All throughout town, I kept hearing the same 3 words to describe it…this never happens. Again, I just nodded sarcastically. But training went well. Deena was looking strong, and I was…well, I was there. Although I hit a bit of a rough patch, I was actually getting excited about the marathon.

After 4 weeks of successful training and countless hours of wishing I had brought snow boots, we left for Los Angeles. From there, we flew to Germany for the Berlin Half Marathon. This race would be our first since October and a good indicator of how our preparations were going for London. After sleeping for precisely zero hours of a 14 hour plane ride, I was anxious to get to the hotel.

Unfortunately for us the only German I know is “Four beers, please.” Normally having an excess of beer is not be a problem, but since Deena and I were preparing for the race, we agreed that Andrew would have to drink all the extras. Fortunately for us, the race staff was very helpful and we survived our time in Berlin without being blocked too much by the language barrier.

The race was a success, as Deena set an American Record of 67:34, and I also ran a PR for the distance. After the race, we visited the site of Checkpoint Charlie and got our passports stamped with replicas of the stamps from the former East Berlin. Only afterwards did I begin to question the legal ramifications of putting random stamps in your passport. Andrew and I started to fear that they wouldn’t let us out of the country. Although we did get a look from the officer that said the German equivalent of “stupid tourists,” they allowed us to board the plane to London.

We were staying in Teddington, about 15 miles outside of London. Our apartment overlooked Bushy Park, where we did most of our workouts. There were 2 other parks within a few miles of us, so we had several great places to train. The weather was mostly sunny, quite the opposite of the typical England rain and gloom. Finally, after 5 cities in 3 countries, “this never happens” was a good thing.

Because we were tapering, there was a lot of free time. So we learned a lot about soccer. Deena became obsessed with Sudoku puzzles. We would often walk into town and peruse the local stores. I purchased some shirts at one store where I was hit on by both a male and a female employee. Evidently I send out a confusing vibe.

Race day was extremely exciting, as Deena won the race and set an American Record of 2:19:36. Even with a constant drizzle hampering the morning, the crowds were large and extremely vocal. The race was very challenging, as I was pressing the entire time. I never really got comfortable, and I knew early on that it was going to be an ugly finish. Even though I didn’t feel like I had my best day, I still finished my first marathon in 2:20:27. I was extremely happy with the experience in London, and I’m already looking forward to the next marathon even though I swore at mile 24 that I would never do it again.