Runners are creatures of routine and changes are a difficult thing to adjust to.  Change is a part of maturing and taking a step into the future. I have always had trouble coping with change, and the outcomes it brings. Changes are hard but inevitable. When a person takes a step into a world of wondering and unknown expectations, it can be a little scary. I am about to experience a significant change, and I am nervous but also excited to new possibilities.

I have been an elite athlete with ZAP Fitness for the last four years. It has been a wonderful journey that has enabled me to become successful in the sport of running. With their help, I hope to continue the success I have gained.

Within the next two months, I will be leaving ZAP to go home to prepare for my wedding. This is a huge step for me, but also very exhilarating. I am ready for the change, but it still freaks me out to try something different, outside of the environment I have been living in. Not only will I be getting married at the end of August, but I will be moving to another location, and starting a new life for myself. I should be ready for it, since I am 27 years old.

The great thing is that I get to move to my old stomping ground of Lexington, KY, and continue to train and race. It will be like old times back in college, but with new experiences. Thomas Morgan and I will be newlyweds (even though we have been dating for nearly a decade), and he will be an assistant coach for UK, while I will be volunteering for the team, and training. It is a new and exciting endeavor for Thomas, and I am looking forward to being there for him. Even though I am entering a different path in my life, I am open minded to new opportunities and adapting accordingly.

Another new and exciting opportunity will present itself in my first trip to Europe. After racing well at US Nationals this past weekend in the 10,000 meters, I will be leaving June 30^th with a fellow teammate, to spend the next two weeks in Europe. There I will be racing a 1500 and a 5,000, in hopes of getting some PRs and finishing the season off with a bang. I have been looking forward to going to Europe for the last three years, but especially so because I am fit and ready to go. It should be an awesome time and a once in a lifetime opportunity.

Even though the life I have known for the last four years is coming to a close, I can look forward to the changes that lie ahead. I look forward to getting stronger and improving as an athlete, and continue to succeed at the highest level I can attain. I just have to put one foot in front of the other and keep moving forward.

Allison Grace

I think that it is safe to say that summer has arrived here in the mountains. The weather is hot, humid, and oppressive. In the afternoons we sit around ZAP hoping for the clouds to open up and bring some relief to our sweaty situation. Although perspiring more than I would like to be while just sitting around, I am very happy to see this next season arrive.

Summer is a generally a carefree time and I know that I, too, am beginning to feel a bit more carefree as I have just returned from an extended stay in Boston. While home, I underwent a series of procedures to eliminate the plantar fasciitis I have in both feet. I am already feeling some benefit from the treatments and I am optimistic that the work I have had may cure my foot issues for good.

I have been looking forward to summer mostly because my spring did not go as well as I had hoped. Acute peroneal tendinopathy kept me out of this year's Boston Marathon. When the decision was made to forgo the race, I took a full break, complete with an immobilization boot, to allow my injury to heal fully. This injury was the first major one I've experienced and I spent much of the rest of my spring wondering if I would be able to come back. I questioned the strength of both my body and my faith. Would I be able to bounce back from this major challenge?

A few months later, as the days have grown longer and longer, I can see how little worrying was necessary. Much like summertime, my body has begun the process of renewing itself the same way all plants renew themselves each year. Slowly but surely, I am regaining strength and fitness lost.

When I was a very small girl my grandmother gave me a locket that she had found. Within its clasp were inscribed the following words from Matthew 17:20:

"...[I]f you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain,
'Move from here to there' and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you."

When I received the locket I did not fully appreciate the message it contained, but I do remember thinking how tiny a seed of mustard really is.

Over the last few months I have, at times, felt as though my faith was only as large as a grain of mustard, but sometimes, perhaps, that small amount is enough to be able to make the start towards renewal. With summer showing the incredible amount of growth all around us here in the valley, and with reminders from loved ones about the limitless of the human body and spirit, I, too, feel that I am beginning to renew myself again. Now if I can just find an air conditioning unit to escape this heat!

Have a happy and healthy summer!
-Jess

I have always enjoyed all three seasons of distance running.  Cross country season places the largest emphasis on the team, as most people in our group train together in all workouts (rather than splintering into their specific groups during the track season).  Here at Zap, we have run the US Club Cross Country Championships for the last few years and have brought back the trophy three out of the last four years.  After cross country comes the opportunity to chase new personal bests and click off short, quick laps on the indoor track.  The indoor track season also offers several opportunities to run the full mile, an event that obviously carries great significance.  As the days grow longer and the weather steadily improves, the excitement of outdoor track season becomes palpable.  The days of running jackets and pants give way to shirtless runs.  All three seasons of running are unique, but outdoor track has special and undeniable importance in the sport.  The Olympics and World Championships will always generate much more buzz than the World Cross Country Championships or the Chiba Ekiden. 

Unfortunately, a poorly timed sacral stress fracture derailed my outdoor track season.  I have spent the last nine and half weeks sweating profusely on the elliptical, stationary bike, and in the pool.  Rather than ripping 400s on the outdoor track in preparation for a big race, I have done more 30/30, 45/15, and 50/10 fartlek repetitions in the pool than I could possibly count.  The traditional Sunday long run has given way to two-hour pool workouts during recreational swim in the Lenoir Aquatic Center.  Instead of enjoying the usual Sunday long run debate topics (Are female runners tougher than male runners?  How should we handle overpopulation?), I have been watching local residents jump off the diving board and play Marco Polo.  I would be lying if I said that I have enjoyed all this cross-training, but there is something incredibly satisfying about pushing your body as much as possible in preparation for the eventual return to running. Stan Beachem, our team’s sports psychologist, said to me that the key to cross-training when injured is always to remember that you are training as a professional athlete, even if you are unable to run.  For the past two and a half months, I have taken this advice to heart and never lost sight of my ultimate goals.  With the start of each session, I have had the mindset that setting a new personal best on the elliptical will ultimately lead to personal bests on the track.  As I gradually return to running in the next week, I think I should be in good shape for future training and racing.

               Every time my running gets back to where it needs to be, I sing this song to myself. “Back In The High Life Again” reminds me of how I have to accept the lows with the highs in running.  Every runner has their share of lows in the sport, and that is what makes us tougher and hungrier to want to be on top of our game. This past fall/winter was one of the lowest times in my life as a runner, and it taught me how important running was to me and how a forced break can make you appreciate and respect it even more. 

During my preparation for my debut marathon at Twin Cities this fall, I found out a month prior that I had kidney stones. I had dealt with bladder/kidney issues as a kid, but never to this extent. Even though the stones took me out of the US 20k Road Championships, I was determined to keep training and let them pass on their own. Training had been going very well up until our departure for Minnesota. The exact pain I experienced before the 20k reared its ugly head on the flight over to Minnesota, and I was unable to race the marathon. Though a devastating blow, I returned home hoping to figure everything out.

I found out that I had a UPJ obstruction, which is a block in my ureter tube connecting the kidney to the bladder. I was born with a kink in this tube, and needed surgery to repair it. Also during this time, I had both my legs tested for posterior compartment syndrome. I had been battling compartment syndrome since sophomore year in high school, and decided it was necessary to figure out everything at the same time. I also needed surgery for both legs on the deep posterior compartment, which lies just behind the tibia bone.

With both surgeries lined up in the months of November and December, I was in for a break from running. Both surgeries were a success and I missed about six weeks of training. Getting back into shape proved challenging at first. Let’s just say, having the bladder of an 80 year old woman, did not help with everyday runs, but it was better than not running. I was determined at this point to have a strong spring season.

In the beginning, I was very tentative and scared because I had never taken such a long break from running. I lost a bit of confidence along the way. Once my training and racing started to come around, I knew it would all work out. I went into races without a lot of expectations, and it ended up paying off. I surprised myself in the first two track races of the season, racing a 10k PR at Stanford and almost a 5k PR at Penn Relays, nine days earlier. It seemed that all the hard work and buildup from the fall returned to enable me to be stronger than ever before.

It goes to show that you can never give up or doubt your abilities. I was not sure how it would all turn out at my lowest point, but this misfortune taught me to want more out of my running career and to work towards being better than I was before. The lows may be difficult but are needed to achieve the highs to get back in the high life again.

-Alli Grace

I have come to discover that I am not the fastest learner, not that learning is a race. I have been running now for almost nine years, and I am still struggling to accept the same lessons. For me, it always comes back to confidence and patience, two characteristics that are quite important to distance running and that I tend to lack. I am sure that there are other issues for me to work on as well, but these are the two most prevalent in my life right now.

 

When I first started running, way back in high school as a scrawny little sophomore, I knew next to nothing about the sport. Coming from a swimming background, I was familiar with competing in an individual sport, but when it came down to actually running, workouts, easy runs, proper footwear, I was clueless. I had no concept of who was talented, who was “unbeatable,” what the hierarchy on my school’s team was supposed to be. Looking back, that was such a huge advantage. I could simply step on the line and race. No thought to who was running faster than me somewhere else or who might be quicker in this race, just racing. Enter confidence. Now that I have more of an awareness of the running world, of the myriad of talented individuals out there, confidence is huge. I have to believe in myself, in my ability and drive, in order to make it to the next level. I have faith in Pete; I believe that he is a good judge of talent, and he has faith in me, so why should I not allow myself to believe? I have struggled with this whole confidence issue for awhile, but I am changing my thinking. I know that I am good enough, good enough to be here at ZAP, good enough to compete. I would encourage you to do the same, whether you are a runner or not. Embrace who you are, but be emboldened to have courage in yourself and your abilities. Step around whatever wall you think is holding you back and trust in you. Seems like a pretty obvious and cliché concept, but I already told you I’m not a quick learner, so I’m still working on it.

 

Patience is the other virtue that does not come easily to me. I want what I want, and I want it now. I crave that next pr, that next big jump in training, and am never satisfied. I suppose that the drive to see some results is what keeps me going, but I am learning to temper that to some extent. I just ran a pr, and while it was certainly not pretty, my last 1200 being rather disastrous, it was still a step in the right direction. My initial reaction was to be angry and upset…I fell apart, didn’t finish strong, totally blew it. But the more I think about it, the more I become aware that this too is an area where I could use a change. I have to be patient. I improved my 5k pr, and it is okay to be happy about that. It does not mean that I am settling or giving up. It means that I realize this is a process. I am not becoming complacent in where I am, rather I am seeing the steps along the way, the small victories, pushing on and being patient that the hard work I do now will come to fruition. Savoring the little triumphs is what motivates, but I am usually so busy looking forward that I never even see them.

 

So there you have it. Pretty simple, slightly trite, most definitely not difficult, and yet I am learning and re-learning these things, among many others. It is all right to be a little behind the learning curve, so long as I actually learn the lessons.

 

The air is finally getting a bit warmer, days a bit longer, the sun a bit less forgiving and a fresh coat of yellow pollen covers the ZAP cars. Spring is here, which can only mean one thing: track season is back. So it’s time to lace up those spikes, hammer a few quarters and ramble on in a blog or two about how excited I am.

To be fair, my track season kicked off some weeks ago at the rainy, Raleigh Relays 5k. One way or another, I’m still eager to run a few more races on the track this season. The biggest of which has to be Stanford’s Cardinal Invitational on May 1. I have been gearing up for the 10,000-meter race for almost 7 months now and think that my ducks are almost in a row. Where that row of ducks is going… that’s a different story, but it will be interesting to see. I won't be alone in my travel to sunny California next week. ZAP should be well represented by Frank, Thomas, Ali and Alissa in the 5k or 10k races. It will surely be an exciting weekend, hopefully filled with personal bests. I am also glad that my famil will be able to catch the races live, at Flotrack.com. 

 

As a runner, injuries are part of the game and almost every runner has experienced an injury that kept them out for a race, a season or a year.  Some runners never fully recover from an injury.  Unfortunately, I have not been hindered by a major injury.  Bear with me.  My running career, until last year, has seen continuous  improvement.  Many successes and many failures also.  Good races and bad, just like everyone else.  I have had set backs and periods of burning out, over training and slumps.  But my set backs were never because of an injury.  Usually I would have a body chemistry problem like iron or Mono or some other fatigue mystery.  Its crazy for me to say I wish I could have injuries.  There are people reading this who have had nothing but injuries and think I am a jerk and that I “don’t know how good I have it”.  Runners plagued by injury say “if I was only healthy at this point or in that season, there is no telling how fast I could have ran”.  And this is my point.  That imagination of possibility is what makes runners so good; the idea that forces beyond their control are holding them back.  They yearn for solid consistent training to reach their potential.  I say occasional injuries make runners better.  You don’t take each run for granted but instead come back with fire and passion that stewed when you were sidelined.  You realize the urgency of a day’s training because you never know when it can be taken from you again.  While I don’t explicitly wish to be injured, I do ponder how much more intensity I would gain after coming off a forced break from running where 95% of my body was great but just one part was holding me back and suddenly it’s not.  Full speed ahead.  It’s easy to make these claims from my point of view but everyone has setbacks one way or another

I bring this up because half our team is dealing with injuries.  I see their discouragement but also their fortitude to cross train or rehab or just to stay positive.  I know they are chomping at the bit and would kill to be out there running with me instead of spending a couple hours in the pool staring at a clock.  It is inspiring to see. Observing people with injuries may be the closest I want to get to the experience of not being able to run.  This hunger is hard to capture if you have never had an unplanned absence from the sport.  Regardless, runners do whatever they can to run well, particularly those who’ve had it taken away.  You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.  Cinderella said that.  The eighties hair band, of course.  Not the housekeeper chick that talked to mice.