What's Happened?

Since April, a couple big changes. First, our daughter Emma was born on May 21st (two days before her big sister Grace's third birthday). She has been a real joy, the easiest of our three children at this age. I also got a new job as head Cross-country / Track & Field Coach at Gordon College, a small Christian liberal arts college in Wenham, MA. I hung up my tool belt and am relishing the opportunity to coach full-time and really invest in my athletes here and the program as a whole (something I was never really able to do at the high school level - usually I was changing in the car from my construction clothes into my running gear and trying to come up with an appropriate workout on the ride to practice). My new schedule allows for some more time with my family, which is nice, since my son, Benjamin, started kindergarten this fall, and now I can bring him to school every morning. It also means I'm not completely wiped out at the end of the day, which my wife appreciates. And I have ample daylight hours to train. I've been favoring the midday run so far this fall, since the light is short and the mornings and evenings are cold. I can hardly remember what it felt like to get up and run before 5:00 am, like I was doing last summer and fall; now I usually hit snooze at 7:15.

My training has been consistent this summer and fall, if not exorbitant. I had a nice 3k on Saturday at BU in 8:40.80 (about 6.5 seconds better than my previous best). It makes me think there might be a sub-15:00 5k coming some time this winter if I can make it a priority.

Other highlights from the past few months:

winning the Essex Turkey Trot 8k, for the fifth time since 2006, in 25:51 (my third fastest time there);

winning the Scot Trot 5k at Gordon College in October in 15:49, proving to my college athletes that they can still get faster for a lot of years;

winning the Around the Goose 7k in Gloucester in September in a course record (?) 23:05;

finishing 9th at the Yankee Homecoming 10-Mile in Newburyport in July in 54:32.