2:36:59.
5:59 per mile for 26.2 miles.
Sometimes after I’ve shuffled through a tired run, that time and pace sound far-fetched – faster than I could ever dream of running. Other days, after a smooth session on the track or strong hill reps, it sounds just possible enough to keep me trying. Maybe it could happen this year. If not this year, then maybe next year. And if not next year, then perhaps the year after that. What could I do with another 5,000 or 10,000 training miles? Who could I become?
If you’d asked me four years ago whether I was interested in throwing myself at the Olympic Marathon Trials qualifying standard, I’d have laughed and wondered whether you were joking. Four years ago, I was relearning my love of running through hours and hours on the trails. I was still apprehensive about the uncompromising splits that govern track and road racing. Splits – numbers, quantification – had destroyed me in college. They say that numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the truth, either. I was searching for truths about myself that I couldn’t find through running, at least not on the 400m oval, but that didn’t stop me from trying. I ran myself into injury after injury, frustrated that the numbers on my watch and in my training log failed to align with my hopes for myself and my sense of my own potential. If only I could go back and redo my NCAA career – I now know so much more about my body and my mind. At 30 years old, I have learned to rest, run easy, control effort, hold the long view, let my body cycle, and keep it fun. I’m a different athlete now than I was at age 20 – thank goodness – but I look back on my college career with regret and a tinge of sadness. It could have been so much more joyful.
Over the past decade, my relationship with sport has been about healing. It has also been about allowing rather than fighting: allowing my body to be how it is (a never-ending practice, but one at which I’ve gotten more skillful), allowing seasons of ambition to wax and wane, allowing my sense of curiosity to direct my choices about movement and competition, allowing my workouts to be guided by perceived effort rather than pace charts. This reorientation away from my watch and toward greater intuition has counterintuitively produced numbers that 10 years ago I would have been proud of, or even disbelieved.
Fall road marathon training involved a run up and down Mt. Whitney in September - a bit unconventional but it kept the joy alive!
2022 was objectively the fastest year of my life across a range of distances from the road 5k to the marathon. These performances were supported by thousands of anonymous miles. Over the course of 2022, I ran 2,800 miles and climbed 325,000 vertical feet. During peak fall training, every week I ran about 75 miles and cycled an additional 40 miles (and over only six days per week, too, with Mondays preserved for sacred rest). I loved it.
Though I’m no longer afraid of numbers (after all, numbers do have a role in sport), they’re not the whole story, or even the most compelling part of the story. The real story is that over the past year, I have learned to believe deeply in myself. 20-year-old Lucy would be proud.
Will I ever in my life run 2:36:59? Who knows (and really, who cares! It’s just running, after all). Probably not – I’m closer than I ever thought I would be, but perhaps not close enough, since I’m in a spot where I will have to grind for every minute I need to drop. It’s a moonshot. But it will be fun to try, and I’m sure that many adventures will happen along the way. Bring on the miles, the vert, the endless pairs of shoes, the gels, the pre-dawn alarm, the laundry, the strength work, the fatigue, the strides, the weather, the trails, the tarmac, the start lines, the finish lines, the suffering, and the joy. Bring it all. Here we go, 2023.
