The 2020 training sheet gets thin after March 8.
Before that, it looks like a normal race plan. There are workouts, target times, small problems, and races on the calendar. Then the entries stop.
On January 9, I ran an indoor 1,000 meters in 3:00. On January 16, I cut a bad treadmill session short at about six miles. I was sick on January 21 and 22. A February 3 workout ended early because I felt terrible. On February 20, a sore Achilles led to a choice between rest and cycling.
The entries are short and practical. They record what happened and what needed to change. A poor workout did not become a crisis. Illness meant backing off. The Achilles note put cycling beside rest because running was not the only way to keep the week moving.
None of those notes was unusual by itself. Training plans change all the time. A workout goes badly. A tendon gets sore. A runner gets sick. The next week gets adjusted.
The planned season was still clear. The sheet included the Washington Heights 5K, the New York City Half, a duathlon at West Point, and the Boston Marathon. Running and cycling were both part of the build.
Those events required different preparation. A 5K rewards speed. A half marathon and Boston require longer running. The duathlon adds cycling and transitions. The sheet was trying to hold all of that in one season while also responding to ordinary health and injury problems.
The race names in a plan show intent, not completion. The Washington Heights, NYC Half, West Point, and Boston entries should not be turned into results. They tell us what I was preparing for before the calendar changed.
Then COVID changed the calendar for everybody.
The sheet does not contain a long reaction. It simply becomes sparse after March 8. That blank space should not be treated like a diary entry. It does not tell us exactly what I felt or which race cancellation mattered most.
It does show that the plan stopped working as a plan.
Prospect Park Track Club published its own update on April 21. The Club Points Training Group, which I co-led with Noah Devereaux, was on hold during the shutdown. The club did not know when normal racing would return.
That added another part to the interruption. I was not only training for my own races. I had a coaching and community responsibility. Group workouts depended on people meeting in the same place, often early in the morning, to run a shared session. In spring 2020, that was no longer a reasonable thing to do.
PPTC's April update named Noah Devereaux and me as the co-leads. That public record supports the role without requiring private club email or a claim about how every runner handled the shutdown. The group was on hold. We did not know when it could meet normally again.
The careful version of this period is short. I had specific goals. The preparation had already included illness, bad workouts, and an Achilles problem. Then the public-health crisis canceled races and stopped the group schedule.
The training did not necessarily stop. A later public race report says Paul Thompson and I trained together through the first pandemic year in the Hudson Valley. That account supports continued running and a shift in place. It does not fill every empty day in the spreadsheet.
It also does not prove that the original Boston or duathlon plan continued in another form. Training without a race date can have a different pace and purpose. The later source only establishes that Paul and I ran together during that year.
The sheet is still useful because it shows what I expected before the shutdown. The Boston Marathon was a real target. The NYC Half and West Point duathlon were on the way. Cycling was an option when the Achilles needed a break. I was trying to move through a season with several kinds of racing.
March removed the sequence. There was no next race to tune for and no normal group workout to lead.
Later training records would become detailed again. There would be a duathlon national championship in 2021, thousands of miles of activity logs, long cycling days, and eventually a ride across the country.
On March 8, 2020, none of that was known. The last useful fact in this story is the gap itself.
The plan had races. Then the races were gone.