Happy New Year! Bye, 2020. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. 

I know we have a long road ahead of us, but I’m still relieved and hopeful about what’s to come. I’m even getting my first dose of the COVID vaccine this week, and feel so grateful for that. 

So what’s going to happen with road racing this year? Will most races return in the spring? Summer? Fall? 

Who knows. 

A few weeks ago, I decided to register for the Runners Marathon of Reston (Virginia) on April 11. It’s a small race (less than a thousand runners) and the organizers are offering full refunds if they have to cancel. Registration for Coastal Delaware 2021 was on hold indefinitely, so I decided to take a chance. And sure enough, the organizers of Coastal Delaware sent out an email this week saying they were postponing the race from April to November. 

I’m not really sure what I am going to do, as I am still planning to run the Philly Marathon in November. The rescheduled race date is a week before Philly. Sooo…..I could train for CoDel and then just run Philly for fun. Or I could drop down to the half. Or I could see about getting my money back and just bagging it all together. I’ll run it eventually. 

I was planning to run Rip It’s Little Patuxent River Run, both the half marathon and the 10K, on the last weekend of this month. But COVID has forced that to be postponed until the weekend of March 6-7. This will make things challenging, as that is a weekend when my marathon training plan has me running 20 miles one day, 10 the next. I will probably just end up tacking on extra mileage after each race — 6.9 miles after the half, 3.8 after the 10K. (The half and the 10K are being held on separate days this year to minimize crowd size.) 

Overall, I am trying to be conservative as far as what I sign up for, at least during the first half of the year. I deferred last June’s Columbia Association Triathlon after it was canceled, so that is on my calendar for this June. Rip It is still planning for it to be a live event. Philly was a deferral from 2020. I was also registered for the 2020 Chicago Marathon, and I’m planning to defer that until 2022. That is one of the biggest marathons in the world and I am just skeptical that it could happen by October. That does free me up to run the Baltimore Running Festival in October, assuming it happens. I just signed up for the 10K, a new distance for the event, this week. 

And…… that’s it so far. I want to race more in 2021, but it is what it is! 2020 has taught me many things, but one of the main things is that I don’t need to race to enjoy running. I’m very thankful to have had running as a positive outlet in a very odd year.