Eyes on the Starting Line

Planning my Running & Racing Calendar

Ah, January. Start to a new year. The opportunity to commit to resolutions: to improve your health, to super-charge your running. To stare endlessly at the wall in front of your treadmill, as you avoid the sub-zero temperatures outside, and attempt to log hours and hours of soulless laps indoors.

OK, maybe this is partly why 43% of resolutions never make it past the first calendar page.

So I try to keep my spirits up and my training focused by planning ahead with my annual race calendar.

Having races, both virtual and in-person, looming in the weeks ahead helps make sure I don’t let up on my base mileage or kicking up the pace in speedwork. And in the cold slog of winter I try to plan a sunny getaway or two.

It’s All About that Race, ’bout that Race

I sometimes long for the early months of my training, when my focus was dropping pounds and progressing from the couch back to the starting line. At the start of 2021, I was mostly hoping I could work my way up to running 3, maybe even 6, miles straight through. But by May I was close enough to that goal that I decided to enter my first race in 7 years.

My boss was forming a team to join her in the Girls on the Run 5K. Though the race would be run in New York, I figured I could make a virtual return to the racing world without embarrassing myself too much. I logged the miles, uploaded my time, and a few days later a medal arrived in the mail. Sweet!

Shortly after that race, I decided to sign up for the Sioux Falls Marathon 10K, my first outdoor race since an 8-miler in Nashville Thanksgiving of 2014. With the starting gun set to go off in late August, I started moving beyond trying to get running again to getting into racing shape. Which also allowed me the luxury of thinking: what next?

Throughout my high school and college and young adult running, I’d devotedly recorded miles in running logs. For years, I’d bought the same steno notebook at Revco, then CVS, drugstores to log every run and plot every course. After college, I bought an accountant’s ledger book to record each day’s workout line by line by line. But as the gaps between my bouts of fitness increased, I opted for the ease of virtual tracking: RunKeeper and iFit would automatically record my workouts and help me chart my progress. That left it up to me to get it done each day.

But as I looked beyond that August 10K and adjusted my 2021 goals to reach my favorite racing distance, the half-marathon, by year’s end, I knew I needed to plot my daily and weekly mileage more deliberately, weeks and months in advance. I opened a spreadsheet in Google Docs, and began looking for local races to round out the calendar and propel me to new training goals. (I was also a sucker for race T-shirts and medals, which I started to hang around the otherwise uninspiring wall in front of that basement treadmill.)

Runsignup.com was my first source. I’d registered for the Girls on the Run 5K there, and also scouted out the Sioux Falls Marathon 10K that August.

I populated my late 2021 calendar with a balance of virtual races — the majority of which, then, were offered by my treadmill company, iFit, and came with complimentary medals and live-casting of the races (awesome, if short-lived) — and local events. I ran a local 15K for Halloween (no medal), a 5K at Thanksgiving (medal), and actually won a five-miler before Christmas (again, no medal), in addition to four iFit races all over the map. I figured: if I was running anyway, I might as well pick up a medal for it, right? It wouldn’t be long before a thing for bling would factor into my branching out for my race search.

Have medal? I’ll travel

Through early 2022 I was content to alternate my racing schedule with an iFit livecast followed by a local race in Sioux Falls. Although I enjoyed the varying distances of the Chilly Cheeks 10-mile, and the Sioux Falls Skedaddle Half-Marathon (which I’d signed up for the previous August at the marathon 10K expo), and also a May 5K that I ran, unknowingly, with COVID, and a three-races-in-one-day binge for St. Patrick’s Day (5K, 5-mile, and 1-mile), I’d been racing enough at home to learn a few things I valued in the experience:

• to try and find races that wouldn’t start, end, or loop on the same stretch of the local, city-encircling bike path I ran in training nearly every week
• to ensure that if I was going to put in the sweat equity for a 10-miler, or 9-miler, or 5-miler, or single-day trifecta. the event would be welcome to a nice chunk of my money as long as they ponied up that trinket I got a giddy kick out of — a finisher’s medal.

A bit irked by the local letdown, I took to RunSignup and other sites like RunningInTheUSA to search regionally, starting with races in Iowa and Nebraska and Minnesota. I was pleased to discover nearby gems like The Bridges Run for Our Future in Storm Lake, which offered a scenic half-marathon around town (I even programmed the Google Maps version into my treadmill for dreary days). And with a little digging, I found virtual options for nationally-known races like the Falmouth Road Race in Massachusetts, and the Run to the Moon in Neal Armstrong’s birthplace in Ohio.

I also signed up for the bigger virtual races sponsored by Medal Dash, like the Run for Snoopy 10K with its winner of a medal with Snoopy and pal Woodstock, and the Big 10 10K for which I snagged an Ohio State race T-shirt.

By the end of 2022, I had managed to schedule a Thanksgiving 5K for when my family would be traveling to Nashville for Thanksgiving (I won my age group, spoiling the day of a local whose longtime competitor had just aged into the next bracket, ha-ha-ha), and planned a return to my wife’s Kansas City for our favorite barbecue and a comeback half-marathon after running my first marathon in 24 years back home in Sioux Falls.

It Keeps You Running

By 2023, I’d totally caught the travel-to-run bug, with 3 local races scheduled, 5 virtual, and 9 out-of-town, with a sore Achilles eventually taking me out of the Sundance-to-Spearfish Marathon in September, though we made the trip as a family anyway.

I tied races in with college visits to Pittsburgh and Lincoln with my oldest, and we made a family reunion out of the Garmin Olathe Marathon in Kansas. I relished the chance to see different courses and experience their communities at the same time. The Early Bird 10-Mile in Omaha, and the Good Life Halfsy in Lincoln, both run by Pink Gorilla, were standouts I’ll definitely run again. While I intend to make a habit of visiting Storm Lake each summer any time they’ve got their race running.

So, as I eye the year ahead, I start to fill in my calendar according to these organizing principles:

• I want to run two marathons
  • The first, June 1, in Fargo
  • The second, a comeback entry in the Sundance-to-Spearfish Marathon in September
• That sets my training calendar from February through mid-September, with recovery months before and after, so there’s enough room for:
  • an early half-marathon, in this case in March in Yankton, SD
  • for which I’ll double up on a virtual race in Sunset Beach, NC
  • and rack up a virtual 10K from the same North Carolina race sponsor
  • while flying to North Carolina for a February 10K to beat the winter doldrums
  • I’ll be able to work in another half-marathon in the summer, and likely head back to Lincoln for a follow-up halfsy in November
  • I might hit up virtual races like the Big 10, Falmouth and Neal Armstrong, while also seeing if I can work in the excellent Skedaddle locally, and Thanksgiving and Christmas races wherever we celebrate

So far, the early calendar is shaping up like this:

Wherever you find me lacing them up and lining up, I’ll be sure to covet that finisher’s medal and see if I can smoke my way to a PB. Happy running, all!