At the start of March 2015, I wrote my coaches that my training had fallen apart for the last month.
First I was sick. Then I was closing on a condo. At the same time, I had started exploring a job change. That meant breakfasts, dinners, interviews, and other conversations before and after my normal workday.
I had not been showing up for Thursday training, and I had also done a bad job telling people what was happening. My coach emailed to check whether I was okay and ask what I needed.
I felt terrible about it.
Only a few months earlier, I had written a racing bio for City Coach. I listed the Brooklyn crew, Amanda, and Eva as my family. I was living in Williamsburg and working as VP of Technology at Shutterstock. My racing highlights included an Ironman, a half Ironman, three Leadville Marathons, and a 1:26 Philadelphia Half Marathon.
I ended that bio by saying I was trying to be faster at thirty-one than I had been at eighteen. I also said I wanted to run a sub-six-minute beer mile as soon as someone volunteered to operate the camera. “I'm just here to party” was the final line.
By February, I was not training consistently at all.
The illness was the first interruption. Closing on the condo took time and attention. Buying a place in New York involved documents, money, inspections, calls, and decisions that did not fit neatly into the rest of the day.
The possible job change added another schedule on top of that. I was still doing my job at Shutterstock, where I led technology at a public ecommerce company with a large global image and video marketplace. The interviews and meetings had to happen around that responsibility.
Some were at breakfast before work. Others were at dinner or after work. I described it as an everyday pre-work and post-work challenge. I did not have a quiet block of time to consider the next job. I was trying to do it around the job I already had.
Training was the part that disappeared.
That was depressing for me. Running was normally one of the ways I handled stress, and I was used to having a schedule. When the schedule fell apart, I lost both the workouts and the routine that helped me deal with everything else.
The winter weather made it worse. New York had snow on the ground, and getting outside required more effort. I could usually work around bad conditions, but sickness, the condo closing, and interviews had already taken most of the available time.
I apologized to the coaches for not communicating. They could help adjust training if they knew what was going on. I had instead gone quiet while missing the group sessions, which left them to ask whether I needed something.
In the reply, I did not claim that I would be back to normal the next morning. I said I probably needed another week before I could try to get back on schedule. I would update everyone then.
That was about as much of a plan as I could make.
I had a history of setting large race goals and building detailed spreadsheets around them. In 2012, I had tried to fit a Boston qualifying marathon, Leadville 100, two half Ironmans, a long swim, and several time goals into one year. I liked ambitious plans and specific numbers.
This month did not need another ambitious plan. It needed me to finish the condo closing, get through the job conversations, recover from being sick, and tell my coaches the truth about where I was.
I did not yet know whether I would change jobs or what the rest of the race season would look like. On March 1, all I knew was that training had been off for a month and I needed at least another week before trying to restart it.
That was not the update I wanted to send. It was the accurate one.