Making our initial descent

Our final few weeks of training are here

If you’re planning on running the Athens (Ga.) Half Marathon with us the first weekend of November — and I hope you are! — you can see from where we are on the calendar that we have a little less than a month to go before the race.

The miles you’ve been running, the long runs you’ve been getting in each weekend, the mid-week faster runs, they’re all coming down to these final few weeks. It’s the part of training for a race I’ve always enjoyed the most, the time when all your effort hits a crescendo, when you’re near the climax of the story you’ve been writing as you train.

You can see the finish line ahead, it’s not too far away. It’s just a little beyond where we are right now, in the distance. It’s funny — even now, after all these years, when I do a long run I still need to coax myself through the last couple of miles. I still need to reassure myself I can do it, and talk myself through it.

I know some of you have already run races this fall, and others have races coming up — some of you are even training for the New York City Marathon, which runs the same day as the AthHalf. If you’re running NYC, definitely keep in touch — I can’t wait to hear how it goes!

(The same goes for any race you’re running, by the way!)

There’s a great line by the poet Robert Frost that I stumbled across recently: “the afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” That applies to anyone who trains for a big race, I think, in that you’ve made it through a dozen or more weeks of training; you’ve persevered through difficulty, dealt with low (or no) motivation sometimes, and challenges with your schedule.

And you’re still here, lacing up your shoes and putting one foot in front of the other. No matter how it goes, how fast or how slow you run it, that’s a win.

Recently, I stumbled across an interview with Kathryn Schulz, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of 2022’s Lost & Found, a book I’ve been reading for a while now (and will write to you about at some point).

In the interview, she shared some advice she had for aspiring writers that she got from a running coach, and I loved what she had to say: