When I was a junior in college, I joined the cross country/track team. It was close to the end of the first semester, so this meant that my time on the team would be limited, but it interested me either way. I would get one season of cross country as a senior, and two years of running distance in track. I found myself in this position by be taking an intro to half marathon class as one of the two kinesthesiology credits I needed to graduate. I had been a runner before this point, but never with too much distance. I enjoyed running four or five miles a day, but I rarely ever did much more. Once I started the class however, I created a schedule for the week and then on Saturday or Sunday I would do a long run, and I added a mile each week until I got to 13, then once there for a few weeks, I decided I could up it a little more and plateaued at 15. When it came time to race, I did very well and got 4th by running a 1:27:29, which is still my PR for a half marathon today. After receiving some confidence from a friend I had had since freshman year, I decided to ask the coach of the class, who was also the cross country coach, if I could join the team, and he said yes. Then after some meetings to get the team ready for track season, I found out that one of the main goals as a member of the team was to run 3,000 miles in a year, about 60 miles per week on average, so my journey and obsession with 3,000 miles began.
So when 2018 started, my first 3,000 mile journey began. I was dead set on achieving that goal no matter what, and as a new member, I was worried that I was not going to make it, so unnecessarily every run that was scheduled for practice, I ran an extra mile each time. Obviously over the course of a year this adds up quickly, and I was easily able to achieve the 3,000 miles in 2018. There was a problem though. Around the start of my senior year, fall 2018, something weird started to happen with my breathing. I could no longer get full breaths while I was running, and breathing is incredibly important to running, especially when trying to run fast. This led to my legs getting tired much quicker than usual, much slower times, and the inability to push myself as hard as I wanted. When it first started, I wanted to believe that it was not a huge deal, and that it would eventually go away. It did not. In the Fall it affected me, but it was not completely debilitating. I did not reach the goals I had quite hoped for, but I pushed through. I kept pushing through, but then I had the chance to run another half marathon in December of 2018, and this was when I realized that something was truly off. I had just spent over a year truly training to be a runner and following a plan from a coach, and thus I should have been able to PR easily with all of the new fitness, but somehow I had performed worst by about two minutes. I was baffled. I did finish 2018 with my head held high being one of two boys that ran the 3,000 miles that year, but it soon dropped lower than it ever had before.
Early on in 2019 I started to try and figure out the problem that was occurring with my breathing. I went from doctor to doctor. I was told that it could be allergies, but this did not make any sense, because at this point I was in my fourth year at Berry, and I had never had a struggle with breathing before, even when my allergies were at their worst. Then I was told by many doctors that it had to be asthma. Again it seemed odd to me that through twenty one years of living, that I had just become asthmatic in such a force, but I tried inhaler after inhaler, and none of them helped, my struggles continued. I slowly fell off the wagon. I was no longer running an extra mile with each run; I was not even running the miles and workouts I was scheduled to do. I was cutting them short. The times I was supposed to run on the workouts, I could not longer even come close to hitting my times on workouts, and after running such a disappointing 1500m in March before spring break, I decided I was no longer going to race, unless I ended up being able to breathe again. It got to the point where when I was breathing, it felt like I could not get a full breath into my lungs, it felt like when I would breath in, it would go to the top of my throat and not much further. I could not really take a deep breath anymore even when not running.
There were still two avenues to look at for possible solutions. One was the possibility that I was having vocal cord disfunction. I had started student teaching senior year, so I was talking way more than I ever had before, so it seemed like a good avenue to go down. The symptoms of VCD are the same as asthma, but inhalers would not solve this problem. There were certain breathing exercises to try to help get breathing function back to normal, so I tried and tried, but nothing changed. I was still stuck at running mile times close to 9 minutes. Then I went to the ENT, and he put a scope through my nose and partially into the top of my throat. From what he saw, he said that it looked like I could possibly have tracheal narrowing, thus restricting my airflow, but he said he would not know for sure, unless I went under full anesthesia and had something different shoved down my throat to investigate, but even then it would take some surgery to fix that problem, so this really left me with nothing. I graduated college and over the summer decided that even though I could no longer run like I wanted to, that I could still run slowly and get up to 60 miles a week and try to get to 3,000. So on my break, I did. I ran twice a day to get up to about nine miles a day, which over the course of the week got me to 63 miles for the week give or take a few miles.
Then in the Fall of 2019 I found a solution, kind of. In the Spring of 2019, there had been a few days where I ran and felt close to normal. Those couple days I felt close to normal were on days where I had had air blown back into my lungs, like in CPR class when I blew into the dummy, but the air mainly went back into my lungs because the dummy’s airwave was not opened completely. It is hard to explain, but it felt like it had reinflated my lungs, and it lasted for like a day, then I was back to slogging out miles instead of running. So I knew I needed to find something to function similarly to that day, so the best idea I could come up with was something I had seen on movies/tv shows. A manual resuscitator, or as I call it a CPR air pump thing, if you do not know what I am talking about just google it, it will pop up. I bought one on Amazon, and I started to blow air into my breathing passage every time before I would go for a run, and it started working! For over half a year in the depths of my despair, I had been praying and praying that I would be able to run 7:30 miles again consistently, and if I could just get to that point, then I would be happy, and slowly I started to get there. I was able to enjoy running again. The thing that had become my greatest love, then my greatest frustration, had started to become a joy again.
So in 2019, I did fail to reach the oh so coveted 3,000 miles. I started the year strong pushing through all of the breathing troubles, but I had such a bad spring that I could not recover, and I got hurt in November once I had started running a good deal faster again, I got overly excited and went too hard too soon. I cannot remember exactly my total for the year, but it was about 2,700 ish, maybe a little less.
This brings us to the 2020 quest. I decided in January that I needed at least one more 3,000-mile year sense I had let myself down the previous year, even though it was due to extenuating circumstances. I initially kept my two run a day model to get any where between eight and ten miles a day during the week, and then on the weekend I would do a long run Saturday, and maybe a couple miles Sunday. So I was able to cruise up to 60 miles a week pretty easily, especially once I got my long runs up higher, but then in March, like the week before everything shut down, I did a 17 mile long run, my previous high for the year had been 14, and it was too big of a jump apparently. My Achilles really started to hurt after that. I could barely run a couple miles, without being in some pain and extreme discomfort, so instead of getting months with extra down time to run a ton of miles, I was now restricted to putting together very few miles at all. I was not fully better until May, and I think the problem persisted due to some shoes that were rubbing me the wrong way, but I will never know for sure. So in May I was not on pace to get 3,000, so something had to change. The end of June brought a shift in my approach, I went back to doing training runs like I did in the prime of my short collegiate career. Instead of doing two short runs a day I started to do one longer run and doubling not as often. I also started to integrate workouts into my arsenal again. None of this being too fast or easy due to the Georgia heat and humidity, but I was getting back on the horse, so by the time I moved up to New York at the end of July I was back on the horse.
Since I have been up here, I have put together the highest mileage week I have ever had. I ran 90 miles in six days in August, and just last week I ran my first ever 100 mile week. I also have put together my highest ever milage in a month with over 300 miles, thus averaging over ten miles a day for the month. Hitting 3,000 miles in this year was more about proving something to myself than anything. 3,000 miles represents a prayer answered, a joy renewed, and it represents a durability in my legs. The one reason that it is so hard to reach 3,000 miles in a year is due to injury. Running is truly a sport of attrition, and I am glad to say that this year I was largely able to survive the attrition and get back to something I love so much. There was a time when running a bad workout would ruin my day in college or even days, but now even when I do not do as well as I would like in a workout, it is not a big deal just because I am so glad to be able to run as fast as I am running right now. Also since I moved up here I have found a great group of running people, and it feels like being a part of a team again. I ran my first race since March 2019 this November with the group, which felt like a big step in coming back fully. I ran a half marathon, and it beat my time as a senior in college when I could not breath, so I feel like I am truly on the road back.
Running is truly an addiction. Some people may never understand it, but if you know you know. It is hard to quit or even take a day off. It just creates such a feeling of euphoria and is such a good stress reliever, but most importantly, it allows me to have the diet that I do, and to truly be able to enjoy eating without worrying about weight gain. I do not think that my breathing is 100% now, and I do not think it will ever truly be as good as it was, but it is close. I do not think I will ever run a sub 17 minute 5k again, or get close to whatever my 10k PR is, or run a 4:53 mile, but I will be more thankful for each mile that I complete now than ever before.
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