I’ve been holding an idea for the last little while and I want to write it down – I need to hold my self accountable. In Buddhism there is this idea of Satori – momentary awareness – and I think this might be that. One more year of running races, my 31st year of running races, and then call it quits.
My intention is to really dedicate myself to training through the Victoria road racing season, which runs January to May, and then the island trail series, which runs May to October. Run a lot of races. The trail ones are mostly between five and twelve kilometres. And then at the end of that, in 2027, I plan to retire from racing.
To put that in context, I’ve been doing this since I was twelve. That’s about thirty years of racing. I’ll be forty-three.
I’d still be running. Still training, still running with friends. It’s just taking the pressure off of having races on the books.
The reason is that even though I’m getting good training in right now and building fitness, my heels are just too unhappy — although there has been improvement, and it is trending in a positive direction. The Marius Bakken intensity control stuff has genuinely opened something up. I’m training in a way that’s new to me, and it’s working. But even with that, I can’t have heels like this. If I feel this way at forty-two, what am I going to feel like at sixty-two? At seventy-two? Am I going to be missing out on backpacking trips with my daughter — something we only just started doing this year? Dreams of long through hikes and a lot of other stuff?
There’s also the chronic pain side of it. I’ve spent this year learning about central sensitization, and one of the things I’ve had to face is that I can’t keep feeding pain into my nervous system in a chronic way. That’s its own kind of damage, separate from whatever is happening in the tissue.
I don’t know what things will look like in a year. There is still improvement happening across the board. In fact, for the month of August I had only four headache days and four medication days, down from seventeen headache days and fourteen medication days in June. If I get to the end of that stretch, with my last race in October 2027, and I can train like this, and backpack, and not have chronic heel pain, and just feel good — then I’d reconsider. But all the evidence I have so far isn’t pointing me there.
Why it feels good
There’s something that feels genuinely good about this, and it’s not just the injury logic.
It’s a grind doing three workouts a week and everything else that goes with it. There’s a mental ease in thinking, okay, I’m just going to give it my all for this defined period. I haven’t had that in a long time. The defined window is what lets me really focus. It somewhat feels like my last year of racing in college — and that was a great year of racing. 10,000 meter conference champ, just saying.
There’s also something about getting back to racing shorter stuff. That was always really good to me. It’s my roots. It feels like pure running. It’s running fast, which feels nice.
And I like the idea of ending with some really good races and really good training, having learned a lot through this new training method. Not an all-time high. Not the highest note of my running career. But a high note.
Something I noticed recently: the three coaches whose thinking I value most — my own coach Pat McCurry, Steve Magness, and Marius Bakken — none of them race. Magness and Bakken both still train. They’re both still deeply invested in running. They’ve just separated the training from the racing.
I think what ties it together is that at some point you realize the racing was never the Hokey Pokey. The training, the consistency, the fitness, being out there, being connected to other runners – that’s the Hokey Pokey. Racing is a thing you add on top, and it costs something.
Going deeper
I’ve been circling this for a while and I think the honest version is simpler than all of the above.
I want closure.
Racing has been tangled up with pain and disappointment and unfinished business for years now. Dropped races. Seasons cut short. Goals that never happened. A mainly a constant negotiation with my heels about what I’m allowed to do.
I want to be clear that I’m not doing this to avoid disappointment. Disappointment is just life. Honestly, life is more way disappointing than running is.
Obviously I can’t write my own ending to my racing career. Nobody gets to do that. But this feels right. I know what it is. And I don’t know what doors open when I close this one.
