I didn’t necessarily think choosing to run the New York City Marathon this year was the best idea I’d ever had, but I didn’t realize now ill-timed it would turn out to be. Packing up and selling a house, moving across the country, sleeping in the same room as a baby who doesn’t sleep, starting a new job, and buying and moving into a new house are not exactly the kinds of things you want going on in your life as a backdrop for a few months of intense training. Add to that the injury that had me sidelined until August and the sinus infection that stopped my finally on-track training in early October, and you have a recipe for…who knows what. I was feeling pretty good about things, progressing through long runs on the weekend, 10, 12, 14, 16 miles, plus three mid-week runs, recovery runs on Sundays, and even cross-training workouts on my off-days.

But now here we are with three weeks to the race and I’m working through my second week of absolutely no activity, thanks to my now-annual sinus infection, congestion, wheeze, and accompanying general malaise. I really have no idea what’s going to happen on November 3. I hope to start running again this week, but I should be tapering at this point, even though I never reached the point I was supposed to taper from. I’ll modify my modified regime yet again, and we’ll see what happens when you apply the concept of “winging it” to a 26 mile race.

I ran my first marathon nine years ago this week. This will be the third I’ve run since then, and each subsequent race has been run under the cloud of some complication, with the asterisk of some excuse (traffic jam/rushed start in Los Angeles 2010, rainy day plus stunted training due to sickness in Seattle 2011), and I keep wondering if I’ll ever run a race under even close to ideal conditions again. I relish and enjoy the spectacle of the big race, the once in a lifetime feeling I get with these marathons, but the flip side of that outsize quality is that they can take over your life. On a day to day basis, they eat up time, but I should be so lucky that they eat up my time: it’s even worse when they don’t, when you’re injured or sick and can’t train. Then you’ve got all of the burden and none of the satisfaction of doing anything about it. I’m just hoping I get a few decent runs in over the next few weeks and I head to New York with a little bit of confidence and enough enthusiasm to carry me over the finish line.