Is it 2008 yet?  I’m tired of 2007.  On Monday when I started running again after a three-week break, I opened a 2008 calendar and started the year early.  Today was January 4 in my world.  There was a funny cartoon with an elephant on the calendar.  Talking elephants are always funny.  So if you see me celebrating St Patrick’s Day in a few months when everyone else is claiming it’s February, now you’ll know why.  But let’s rewind..

After an unsuccessful spring racing season I returned to Mammoth Lakes in mid-July.  Mammoth during the summer is one of the most spectacular places I’ve ever visited.  Unfortunately I was really out of shape so I wasn’t really able to take in any of the breathtaking views on our runs.  I was too busy focusing on more basic things…like moving my legs.  And breathing.  The altitude seemed to be affecting me way more than normal.  I made a mental note to never show up in Mammoth this out of shape ever again.

It didn’t help that I was meeting up with Dan Browne and Josh Cox for most of my runs.  They were hammering me, except for the day when we dropped Josh by so much that we started to wonder if he had seen the pine cone arrows we had constructed on the ground so he would know which turns to make on the maze of dirt roads near Lookout Mountain.

Luckily Dan and Josh then went to San Diego for a few weeks, so I was able to do some runs on my own.  Normally I don’t like running by myself, but at this point in my training I really needed it.  About a week later Ryan returned from Europe.  Most of our group was still in Europe or Japan, and Meb was away for a few weeks running various road races across the U.S.

For a few weeks it was just Ryan and I.  It was a much different experience than usual for us.  The group has a strong team environment, so not having an array of teammates and coaches at practice every day was strange.  There were definitely some days when Ryan and I struggled to stay motivated.  Other days we had to invent really boring runs where we kept coming past the same spot so we could get water.

We did, however, have company on several occasions.  Ryan’s high school coach came out to watch us during a few workouts and that was a tremendous help.  If our schedules matched up, we would meet with some of the college teams training in Mammoth during early August.  There were large groups of athletes from both Princeton University and Malone College.  Like us, they were very dedicated to their training.  Even on days when we didn’t run with anyone, we would meet up at the creek for a post-workout ice bath.  Eventually the rest of our teammates returned and it was back to the norm.

During a large portion of my time in Mammoth I was living with Dan and Josh.  Living with Dan and Josh was never boring.  They are two of the most entertaining people I have ever met, especially when they are together.  Most of our time was spent with someone making fun of someone else, usually for something ridiculous and inane.

Our favorite topic of conversation was Dan’s jacket.  Dan has this jacket that is so bright yellow that it can be seen from space.  I’m pretty sure it glows, and the energy generated by that glowing could power a medium sized city for a month.  When Dan wore the jacket Josh and I would pretend that we didn’t know he was there even though we were being blinded by the jacket.  An endless stream of asking “where’s Dan?” or “why didn’t Dan come to the run today?” or “those look like Dan’s legs, but where’s his upper body?” would follow.  For some reason this never stopped being funny.

My training was subpar through August and into September.  I was really discouraged.  One day we ran the Mammoth Rock Trail and I got to the highest point in the run feeling like I couldn’t run another step.  It was probably my 87th consecutive bad run.  I started yelling at the rock and scared this really fast chipmunk.  The rock was not intimidated.  It’s pretty big.  At that moment I decided I was quitting and going home.  Things were just not going to work out for me this fall.

The next day I had a great workout.  Running is weird.  Finally things started going well on a daily basis.  My intervals, tempos, and longs runs were better than the workouts I ran leading up to my marathon PR last fall.  The final 5-6 weeks of hard training were great, and my confidence was high as I boarded a plane to return to the east coast for a few weeks before the Olympic Trials.

There are various theories on how many days you should give yourself to adjust to a change in time when traveling.  Most people believe that you should allow one day for every one hour time difference.  I believe in a more radical theory…one week for every one hour.  So I returned home for the last three weeks of training.  There I would be able to adjust to the time change and allow my body to recover at sea level from the previous months’ training.  As usual, my first few days were not good.  My runs were especially bad on the humid days since I was used to the dry weather in Mammoth.  But I wasn’t too worried.  My taper last year was also terrible and I raced well.

A week before the race I started to worry.  That’s when I got really sick.  I barely ran from that point until the morning of the race, but I still felt like I might be able to put together a good race.  During this week I learned that people will tell you the most ridiculous things the last few days before a marathon.  Everything you tell them is great.  Being sick is great because it will force you to get a lot of rest.  Having bad runs is great because your body is saving up for one good run at the end of the week.  Everything is great.

The morning of the race I didn’t feel so great.  From the start I felt like I was running way too hard for the splits I was seeing on my watch and for my position in the elite field.  I wanted to drop out so many times, but I just couldn’t make myself walk off the course.  I ended up running 2:26 and finishing 73rd.  I was extremely disappointed with the result.  People kept telling me that it was good that I finished and that just finishing when a high number of runners dropped out is a great accomplishment, but just finishing is not why I run.  I run to do my best, and this was not my best.

While my race was not great, the atmosphere in the city and in Central Park was.  The New York Road Runners did a fabulous job of putting the race together.  When we lined up to start it was still dark out but there was a huge crowd lining the street.  People were really fired up for the race, especially all the Brian Sell fans.  In the first mile of the race we turned a corner and ran into Times Square.  It was still lit up so that was a very impressive view.  I wish I had a good photo of the pack coming into there.

Once we came into Central Park there were thousands of people lining the course.  Barely any stretches of the loop were empty.  I was not running well, but running on that course with all of those people was quite exciting.  I thought the course was challenging, but fair.  If you trained right and ran smart, you could run fast.  Having trained so much in Mammoth no one hill on the course seemed all that intimidating, but the cumulative effect of all the hills made the last five miles excruciating.

When I finished the race I was extremely happy to see my teammate Ryan Hall posing for pictures with an American flag draped around his body.  Ryan worked really hard this year to accomplish his goal of making an Olympic team, and he deserves all of his success.  Sadly I soon heard the news on the death of Ryan Shay during the race.  Even today, nearly a month later, it hardly seems possible.

Ryan was the first person I met when I came to Mammoth Lakes in 2005.  I had heard plenty about how intense he was in workouts, so I was expecting a similar intensity out of him in a non-running capacity.  Instead I encountered a guy who was laid back, funny, and willing to help me out since I was the new guy.  It was a stark comparison to his running personality.  We lived together for about three weeks before he left to run the Boston Marathon.

I didn’t see him very much until the following winter when we lived together in Woodside, CA.  There were seven of us living in the house, but mostly I hung out with Ryan and Alicia.  From the day I arrived the two of them were inseparable.  When I went to bed they were talking in the kitchen.  When I woke up they were talking in the kitchen, sitting in the exact same spot.  I started to think they never slept.  It was funny because they both refused to admit that they had feelings for each other, even though the rest of us saw it so clearly.

Later that year we spent some time in Leuven, Belgium.  Ryan and I would sometimes go out for a few beers because neither of us was racing.  I was training with Deena and he was there with Alicia.  After that summer Ryan started training in Flagstaff so I would just see him at races.  It was good to get back together with him in the days leading up to the race.

The morning before the race I ran with Ryan, as well as Alicia, Deena, and Halls, and some friends from Philadelphia.  As usual, Ryan was way out in front of us, wondering why were we going so slowly.  That afternoon I sat next to Ryan on the bus back to the hotel from the technical meeting.  We joked about Family Guy and some funny signs we saw along First Avenue.  A bus took the athletes to Rockefeller Center the morning of the race.  There was a room downstairs where we could stretch and relax.  Ryan sat down on the floor next to me and referenced something that had happened in Woodside.  That was the last time I ever spoke to him.

I will miss Ryan, and as others have said before me, I hope that in 2008 I can strive to work as hard as he did.  His dedication to his craft was truly motivating.

So…once again I must apologize for going on for so long.  I think I was born without the part of your brain that allows you to summarize things..