I’ll be upfront, I couldn’t really read until middle school, so don’t expect this to be the most polished thing you’ve ever read.

The goal of this newsletter is to give you a more personal look at my journey, from transitioning out of track racing, dealing with a career-threatening injury, to starting a new chapter in road racing. Each edition will include updates on my running life, as well as what’s going on outside of running. To wrap things up, I’ll also cover a topic suggested by a subscriber.

Since this is the first newsletter, and I have missed about 7 months of this journey since returning from my injury I will give a sparknotes to get people up to speed.

My last year sparknotes

March 16, 2024: I ran Sound Running The Ten with a severely injured groin and OP injury, attempting to hit the Olympic standard (27:00). I ended up running 27:07. I knew if I had any hope of competing in Paris I couldn’t miss this race.

March 17 – August 5, 2024: During this time, I did not engage in “constructive training” (defined by my college coach Mark Wetmore as training 80 or more miles per week). Instead, I biked, started and stopped running a few times, rehabbed, and after 20 weeks, began what has now been 7 months of consistent training.

January 19, 2025: After 10 months away from racing, I finally made it back to the starting line—my longest break from racing since maybe 4th grade. I had high hopes of going after the American record, but about 3 minutes into the race, I realized this would be a big ask. I finished with a time of 61:06, about 1:24 off the record. I was discouraged at first, but Reed Fischer helped me see that it was still one of the top two or three fastest American half marathon debuts ever. Although I wasn’t satisfied with the day, I realized moving to the roads would be a journey I needed to fully commit to. Within an hour of the race, Dathan and I scrapped all track racing plans and began planning a road racing spring to continue gaining experience. It was clear I lacked not just fitness to compete with the top Americans but also experience racing on the roads.

March 2, 2025: Between Houston and USA Half Marathon Championships in Atlanta, I was eager to ramp up my training. We went to training camp in Scottsdale and although navigating a strained hamstring I was able to put a few solid weeks in with higher intensity workouts. I viewed Atlanta as a chance to take a step forward. I had no lofty goals of American records; I just wanted to improve on my Houston performance. Given the hilly course, I knew improvement wouldn’t be judged by time, but about competitiveness. I finished 8th overall(falling short of my goal of top three to qualify or World Road Running Championships), but I was happy to have stayed with the pack (something I didn’t do in Houston) and covered moves until around 8.5 miles into the race. It was a small step forward, but overall still a pretty average result. It was hard to be too happy with the race, but my coaches helped me keep it in perspective as part of the bigger journey.

April 6, 2025: At the Cherry Blossom 10-Mile, I ran 46:08 for 9th place. It’s wild to think that a year ago, this would have been the 4th fastest American time ever—unfortunately its not a year ago and today I was just the 6th American. Again, there were improvements. I committed to a fast pace (about 22:30 at 5 miles), ran strongly for about 8 miles, but struggled in the last two. Still, I’m getting there… (more in the comment on running section).

Comment On Running

I don’t think I will dive too much into workout details instead I will just link to my Strava the workout I am talking about. This section will mostly serve to explain the process behind why we are doing the training we are doing as well as race previews/recaps. In this log I will talk about Dathan and Kelseys approach to adding intensity throughout the first 7 months of this block. To simplify the last 7 months I will break into into phases. Pre-Houston, Houston to Atlanta, and most recently Atlanta to Cherry Blossom.

• Phase 1 Pre-Houston: This was the longest phase, comprising my first week of “constructive training” in early August leading up to my first start line in Houston. The approach was to rebuild physical resilience and lay the foundation that had mostly disintegrated during five months off. The focus was on mileage and gradually reintroducing workouts. Almost all of the workouts were on dirt roads and included a lot of 5:00 pace reps, 50-minute fartleks, and steady long runs. As we stepped up the race distance, we knew the foundation was the most important factor. I had run sub-13 in the 5k and 27:07 in the 10k, so we wanted to rely on that track anaerobic ability and pair it with four months of mostly basic strength work.

  This all seemed like the perfect formula for a strong debut in my first half marathon. The only problem was that the half marathon is intense, and anyone who says it’s just a threshold race has never raced one with the goal of keeping up with Connor Mantz. Very quickly in that race, the anaerobic ability we thought would carry over from the track proved insufficient to handle the demands of early miles in the mid-4:20 range on the road. Although it was frustrating not to be fully prepared, Dathan and Kelsey have a long-term plan for gradually reintroducing intensity. The injury I was recovering from is very sensitive to speed and intensity, so we still needed to be cautious in that area.

• Phase 2 Houston to Atlanta: These phases get shorter, with this one covering just 5 weeks. There’s no better way to identify your fitness deficiencies than a race, so in this phase, we wanted to start addressing them with the long-term plan in mind. If I were coaching myself, I’d probably just run mile repeats at 4:20-4:30 on Thursdays and an 8-mile tempo down to 4:40 pace on Sundays every week (which, realistically, I probably couldn’t have done at this point). But that’s why I have coaches I trust to keep the bigger picture in mind. So in this phase, we began adding track workouts. Nothing I did on the track here rivaled the work I did when I was running my best on the track, but we had to start somewhere.

  The reason for track work for a road runner is to be able to handle the very thing that broke me in the second mile in Houston: rolling with the punches. If I had to describe the biggest difference between track racing and road racing, it’s the punchiness of the roads. In Atlanta, our first mile was 4:35, with an 85-foot incline, directly into a 4:18 mile down a hill with three sharp 90-degree turns. Punchy, not threshold. So how did the track work pay off in Atlanta? I was able to weather the punches for 8 miles instead of just 3 minutes, like in Houston. An improvement, but still not a complete race. Back to the drawing board.

• Phase 3 Atlanta to Cherry Blossom: Again, a nice 5-week increment. This was the first phase where Dathan and Kelsey felt comfortable assigning a workload that was more or less equal to full capacity. This included proper 10k sessions, the same ones that were staples in preparing me for my fast 10ks. We continued to progress the pace on long road reps. But the biggest addition was incorporating intensity into the long run. We cycled through a Canova-style hill climb long run (18 to 20 miles uphill), a Mantz-style fatigued mile rep long run (10-14 miles of steady tempo, followed by 3-4 x 1 mile on the track), and a 20 mile long run with 10-mile easy 10-steady tempo. I found each of these types of long runs challenging but highly specific to the demands of the roads. All of these types of long run require you to put out power with a good amount of fatigue in the legs.

  So, how did Cherry Blossom go? Another average result, but with definite signs that the training is working. I finally felt comfortable with the punchy fartlek-style race, running many miles in the 4:20s. I also managed the roundabouts and U-turns well. After the race, Dathan’s biggest critique was my positioning. Instead of asserting myself as a racer in the lead pack, I chose to hang on the back and yo-yo off the back for 8 miles. It seemed fine until the string on that yo-yo broke, and I had a lonely 2-mile stretch to the finish, watching the lead pack roll away.

• Phase 4? So, where do we go from Cherry Blossom? This race was my third back and my third average result. In the bigger picture, Dathan is pretty pleased with how the process is going, to be back at full intensity, and have 7 months of healthy constructive training under me. However, impatiently we both wish these would translate to races already! With only 5 weeks of what he would consider 100% training, we can’t expect to reap these benefits immediately. So the plan is to rinse and repeat the previous 5 weeks for another 5 weeks leading into the next race: the USATF 25km Championships in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I’ll dive deeper into this training in the next log.

Comment On Non-Running

Since most of my subscribers probably found this newsletter because of my running they may be more unfamiliar with who I am as besides a runner. So I guess in this inaugural newsletter I will share what my interests are that don’t have I do with running.

• Family. My pets are probably the biggest part of my life (aside from Sage). Together have we two dogs Minnie (cockapoo) and Tucker (cavapoo) and most recently a cat named Lucy. I never cared for cats much until I met Sage’s childhood cats that lived with her parents back in upstate.

• MM..Food. If you follow me on instagram you probably have seen the shameless spamming of my sourdough pizza. I would consider this my “non-running” journey. As anyone who makes sourdough knows it truly is a journey to perfect. Probably will be lots of pizza content here.

• Music. I am really into anything hip-hop and anything adjacent to hip-hop. Like I said earlier I got a late start to reading but today if I am gonna read it is probably is something regarding hip-hop. I gravitate most to anything underground, 90s, early 2000’s. My top 5 artists all time go as follows. 1. Atmosphere 2. Brother Ali 3. MF doom 4. Wu Tang Clan 5. Nas. Maybe I will include a song of the log if I remember, maybe eventually this will become a playlist, maybe I will forget. But here is this logs featured song; Doomsday, MF DOOM. These come in no order, mostly just songs I’ve found myself always listening to recently.

• School. While at Colorado I majored in biochemistry and worked in a liquid crystals organic chemistry lab for 3 years. Since making the Olympic team I qualified for a scholarship through the USOPC and have been working towards my masters online from UW-Madison in “Applied Biotechnology” (projected finish July 2026).

Comment on topic from Subscriber

I included this section so this newsletter isn’t just me talking about what I want to the whole time. You either subscribed to make me feel good or to actually read this log. And if you intend to read the log shouldn’t you get some say in what it talks about? So instagram or e-mail me topics you would want to hear me cover.