From Marathon Roads to Mount Diablo

After OC

After the OC Marathon, I knew I needed a break.

The training block had lasted somewhere around four or five months. For the first time in a while, there was no race demanding that I wake up and follow a plan.

I still ran, but inconsistently. Short miles here and there. Nothing that felt like training.

At first, that was exactly what I wanted.

Then I started missing it.

Not necessarily the marathon workouts themselves, but the structure that came with them.

Running had given me something outside of work that demanded attention. If I wanted to improve, I had to plan for it. I had to recover properly. I had to think about what I was doing that day and how it connected to something months away.

There was something satisfying about being meticulous about a goal that existed entirely because I had chosen it.

The itch never really went away.

There was still more there

A couple of months after OC, I started training seriously again.

One thing became obvious pretty quickly: the aerobic base I had built for the marathon was still there.

The weakness was somewhere else.

I needed to become stronger.

Around the same time, more and more of my weekends started moving away from pavement.

Long hikes with friends began filling the space that road running had occupied during marathon training.

And the more time I spent in the mountains, the more interesting running started to become.

On the road, so much of the equation had revolved around pace.

Trail running seemed to ask completely different questions.

Road racing had felt like all gas, no brakes. The trail felt like an adventure.

Seventeen miles in Yosemite

One of the days that changed things happened in Yosemite.

I went with my buddies Ayo and Diego to hike El Capitan.

It was the hardest trail any of us had done.

We were all fit. We were prepared for the challenge. But spending that long moving through the mountains was completely different from going out for a run.

And somewhere during those eight hours, our conversations started moving toward what could come next.

That part stuck with me.

The outdoors had started giving me something I hadn't expected when I began chasing marathon times.

It wasn't only competition anymore.

It was exploration.

I started thinking about running as a way to experience places. Trails could take me into mountains, across landscapes, and eventually around the world.

By the time we finished El Capitan, I knew this wasn't going to be a side project.

This was becoming the next phase of my athletic life.

Then came Diablo

Ayo brought up the Diablo Trail Half Marathon.

The idea made sense.

We had already raced together earlier that year at the SF Zoom Half Marathon. We finished first and second in our age groups and both placed inside the top ten overall.

We knew we could compete on the road.

Now there was another question.

What could we do on a mountain?

Mount Diablo offered something completely different from anything I had trained for before.

The engine still mattered.

But the engine wasn't enough anymore.

Learning a different sport

Marathon training had been dominated by pace.

Trail training has forced me to think about almost everything else.

I am still new enough to trail running that a lot of this is happening in real time.

For most of my athletic life, I have been able to fall back on what I learned playing soccer. Training, conditioning, competition, recovery and pushing through discomfort all feel familiar.

Coaching myself as a runner has often meant taking that knowledge and trying to apply it to something new.

The trails are teaching me that the translation isn't always clean.

Having a big aerobic engine doesn't automatically make you a good climber.

Being fast on flat ground doesn't automatically make you fast downhill.

Fitness doesn't automatically give you technique.

The mountain doesn't really care what your road pace is.

And I like that.

It gives me more to learn.

The fire from OC

The OC Marathon lit something underneath me.

Breaking 3:30 in my first marathon showed me that there was more potential there than I understood.

More importantly, it made me want to understand the sport itself.

I started following running more closely. Then ultrarunning. Then the races, athletes, mountains and challenges that exist far beyond the marathon.

The deeper I looked, the bigger the world seemed to get.

And eventually watching wasn't enough.

I wanted to get into the action.

Mount Diablo is the first real test of that.

It is the hardest trail challenge I will have faced so far.

But I don't think of it as the destination.

I think of it as a benchmark.

In March 2027, Big Alta 28K is waiting.

After that, who knows.

That uncertainty is becoming one of my favorite parts.

A different direction

When I finished OC, I could have made the next chapter very simple.

And I still want to do all of those things.

But running has started expanding beyond that.

I want to see parts of the world that are easier to understand on foot than through a car window.

I want to find out how strong I can become on climbs, how comfortable I can become descending, and how far this sport can eventually take me.

The marathon showed me what training could produce.

The trails showed me how much more there was to explore.

Mount Diablo is simply the next place I get to find out.