Begin again

Change is in the air and since the move up north, I haven’t fully gotten into my weekly rhythms. I’m giving myself patience, but as running is such a central part of my life and knowing just how important it is to embrace change as it unfolds, I’ve decided now is a good time to take a new approach to my training and weekly running goals For the last 4 years, I’ve run an average of 6 times a week with 1 day of rest. I’ve run a pretty consistent 50-70 miles per week during that stretch, with at least one long run + on-&-off quality days. With this structure, I still took a “run-by-feel” perspective, that allowed me to adapt easily based on how the body felt. I never really felt like I was overtraining, because so much emphasis came back to how the body felt, how I recovered and how much enjoyment I got out of the process.   All this makes entirely too much sense based on how much I ding dang love running. It’s one of the purest states of consciousness that I can consistently acce...

Today marks the first week since moving up north to my family’s cabin with my partner Avery and her puppy Josie. My parents moved up here from our house in Eau Claire during the first few months of the pandemic in 2020 - that was also subsequently the last time I found myself up here for a long period of time, waiting out the first few months of Wisconsin’s statewide lockdown.   Do you ever stop and think about how you end up exactly where you are?   A year after I was born, in the spring of 1990, my dad at age 29, would become enamored with building a cabin up in the Chequamegon National Forest. There, on a bit of land his Grandpa had owned along the south western shoreline of East Twin Lake, a lake who’s geology was formed when glaciers began melting away from North America, 19,000 years ago, in a spot that he and his brothers fondly referred to as, “the Meadow” would he and my mom build the foundation for what would become a home and sanctuary to my family and countless oth...