Crazy Fun In Crazy Conditions

This is a copy and paste of a freestyle article I wrote for Level Renner posted by Timothy Ritchie. As some of you may know, I'm one of the six people Level Renner chose to feature in their Level Legion Boston Marathon Edition. A while back they asked me to write a freestyle piece for them and I did it the only way I knew how - blog style. If follow me on Facebook, you probably already read it. Wanted to share it with my blog friends.

Link to the actual article HERE

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Crazy Fun In Crazy Conditions

Apr. 05 Articles, Training no comments

As we get ever closer to the Boston Marathon, members of the Level Legion: Boston Marathon Edition are checking in with some thoughts on the training the race, or whatever else they can come up with it. We let them go freestyle, and we’ll be presenting those to you throughout the week. Up next is…

I am a Central Mass Strider true and true. I owe a lot to this organization. It was because of their volunteering program that I got a time-waived entry to run Boston in 2013. This is a great perk they provide for just a couple hours of your time to help out at local races.

As true as I am a CMS’er, I am also a member of and co-founder of Tri-State Running based out of Webster, Ma. Tri State Running was started by my friend Joana and I to get runners in the surrounding area together so they wouldn’t have to run alone, especially in the cold, dark winter nights. The group started out with just a handful of members and after an article in the local paper, the group practically exploded overnight. Next thing you know we were hosting morning runs, weekend long runs and Tuesday night Pub Runs.

From one of our pub runs

I’m not writing this to promote our group. We are small town and would like to stay small town. But I just want to state that because of this group, my training for Boston 2014 has been some of the best times in my “running life”.  Just about everyone pictured above, with the exception of my wife and two others, I have met through this club. With some, I have become good friends.

Everyone would agree that this winter has been a brutal winter for us runners. Especially so for those of us training for Boston or any spring marathon for that matter. Running with these new found friends has been a blessing to my training. Waking up at 4am for weekday runs have been a bit easier knowing that there would be someone out there to meet me. Those brutally cold long runs on the weekends have felt like short runs as most of us got lost in conversations. Many adventures and many memories were made out there this winter.

Froze my beard one too many times this winter

The extreme cold was the killer of many runs for a lot of people this winter. Most took to running inside on treadmills. I take pride in saying that 99.9% of my runs have been out on the streets in whatever kinds of conditions Mother Nature threw at me. Sometimes they weren’t pretty, but I got them in. I was happy to find out through this club that there were many other crazies like me that did the same. This winter we trained hard and got our miles in, but most importantly we had fun doing it!

When training is this much fun, is it really training? I am lucky to have found these crazy people!