Tracy

Marathon
Written By Mona Angéline

Meet Tracy, who's training for the Virtual New York Marathon in just under a month from now. The photo shows her at the historic Hayward Field, where she recently finished the Eugene Marathon with an impressive time!

One day, Tracy and I ran one of her workouts together, provided by an AI platform that shall not be named (think R**** 🫢). This run proved so exhausting to me I could barely keep up! I tried to quietly indicate that the workout paces and even distances the app provided were for a much faster marathon time than the one she targeted. Tracy's knee and ankle were hurting, and she felt she wasn't running well enough, when in reality her speed and endurance were off the charts!

I offered to adapt her existing plan so it wouldn't lead to injury and burnout. Tracy is a busy lady with a high-level job next to being a wonderful mother. We stuck with a peak week of about 40 miles to accommodate her time constraints.

"You're so much nicer than R****," Tracy said when I told her she shouldn't run a track workout with her knee hurting.

Each of her runs now includes a report on possible pain points, and Tracy is relieved to learn she can stop when things are too hard, or God forbid, painful. Because in the end, she has done the training, put in the work, and she's more than ready to run the race.

Mona Angéline

Mona Angéline is an unapologetically vulnerable writer, reader, book reviewer, artist, athlete, and scientist. She honors the creatively unconventional, the authentically "other". She shares her emotions because the world tends to hide theirs. She is a new writer, but her work was recently accepted in Flash Fiction Magazine, Grand Dame Literary, tiny wren lit, Down in the Dirt Magazine, The Viridian Door, The Machine, Whisky Blot Magazine, and The Academy of Mind and Heart. She loves to review books and has written them for the /tƐmz/ Review, the Ampersand Review, and the Beakful Litblog. Sooner or later she will have to condense this list… Mona is also a regular guest editor for scientific journals although she doesn't use a pen name when her engineering PhD degree is involved. She lives bicoastally in Santa Cruz, California, and in New York and savors life despite, or maybe because of, her significant struggles with chronic illness and mild disability. Learn about her musings at creativerunnings.com. Follow her on Instagram under @creativerunnings and on Twitter at @creativerunning.

https://creativerunnings.com
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