2006: The Year in Running

For Lisa, 2006 was a banner year for her. She began running in March and was able to complete her first 10K only a month later (Pike's Peek, Rockville, Maryland). She continued to build on that and finished her longest race to date, the PriceWaterhouseCooper Half Marathon in September. She topped this off by being one of the 16,000 finishers in the Army 10 miler is October.

Things were a little more bumpy for me. I was super motivated to start getting back into shape with perhaps an optomistic goal of setting a sub-3 hour PR in the Columbus Marathon in October. Things seemed to be on target through the end of August, but I quickly found that unlike when I was younger, things tend to break a little easier than they used to. An Achilles tendinitis forced me to stop running for 6 weeks. Fortunately, it did seem that rest was the elixir, and I gingerly started back by running the Army 10 miler with Lisa in October. I cancelled the Columbus Marathon, but was able to slowly build my mileage back up over the next few weeks and ran the Philadelphia marathon in the end of November. I ran the best race that I could under the circumstances but my 3:16.14 left me 15 seconds over the qualifying time for Boston. I sent in my application anyway, and the powers that be were kind enough to let me slip in. This has done a lot to keep me motivated- I want to run a good race in order to justify my entry, when I line up in Hopkinton on Patriots Day in April 2007. It's the end of December, and I feel like I'm back in the shape I was in before my injury. We'll see what happens over the next 3.5 months...