A Time to Plant

The 8 o'clock evening sky lit up with bursts of blazing blues, showering golds, and streaking silvers. The sun set about 5 hours ago and the deep blackness of Fairbanks space provided the perfect backdrop for the University's New Year's Eve fireworks display.

We strolled along the snowy path we had made under the power lines that run behind our house to get a better look at the show. Our backyard evergreens still hung on to some snow on their lower branches but after several passing weeks of dry weather, most of them had time to shrug it off their highest limbs. The new year brought record high temperatures for certain parts of the valley and we scarcely needed more than one layer to stay warm. Luna was perfectly content to jump around in the snow and chase twigs while the not-so-distant explosives ushered in 2016.

While I remember exactly what I was doing this time last year like it was just the other day, it's hard to believe everything that's happened since then. 2015 will go down as one of my most memorable years of my life.

My racing and training have been constantly adapting, changing, adjusting to new demands and routines. In Hammond, Indiana during the Armed Forces Championships, I reached a new level of pre-race anxiety. I didn't really know where it came from and I know it didn't help my performance  but I've learned to deal with it now better than I could before. My first Ironman-brand event in Victoria brought its own set of challenges. During my countless hours of training, I prepare for just about anything I can think of but training at home doesn't teach you how to race after hours in a plane, several weeks in a row, just seven days after a tough draft-legal olympic race. By the time the Alaska State Championships came around in late summer, I was near the top of my game, in close to the best shape of my life. Considering how I was only competing against 20 other men in the state, I'm not too sure if this could be really counted as a "championship," but either way, I had the fastest swim and run split of the day and it was a great moral boost for the real championships coming up in Chicago. On that sunny morning in September along Monroe Harbor, my coach was able to make it out to the start of the biggest race of my career. I had every reason to have all the confidence in the world going into this one, but something felt a little different. I had the usual butterflies to be sure, but my legs just felt like they were full of sand. I got in plenty of warm up time and had a good sweat going by the time I hit the water but for some reason, it seemed like I couldn't get my body into gear. To some degree, I spent a lot of the race shaking that feeling off and concentrating on my task. While my swim was nothing to brag about, I posted a pretty solid bike split and managed to hang on to the run enough to finish 28th out of 97 of the best age-group athletes in the world. Though there may have been a multitude of unknowable things I could have changed about the details leading up to the race, I have to keep reminding myself that this is my first year in the 25-29 age group bracket and finishing in the top 30% isn't exactly a bad start.

As a satisfying bonus to a well rounded season, the Army was nice enough to fly me to D.C. to run 10 miles around the capitol with my Alaska teammates. On the heels of a season of some of the hardest and focused training I've had, I ran six seconds faster than my goal of 1:01:40. There are fewer feelings more satisfying than exceeding my own expectations of race performance. That coupled with a chance to tour around D.C. by myself for a whole day made for an exceptionally memorable bookend to my season.   

Training and racing will always be about the process. Every result I'll ever have for the rest of my life will still leave me with a yearning to go further and finish faster. Maybe not right after I cross the finish line, or even on the drive home or the week after the race, but that feeling will come. On the crest of this new year with another exciting lineup of races, one thing I know for certain is that the soil is ripe for planting and now is the time to get to work.

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