My Running Hero
Scott and I after BQ2
How It All Started
About 10 years ago I was working part time at a fitness club as a personal trainer. The nice thing was that we didn’t have to actively recruit clients. We would get requests for a trainer from the front desk and if someone was available on a particular day they got a client. I only mention this because it highlights the randomness of my encounter with Scott.
Scott came in with a main focus of losing weight. Shortly before he came in to the gym he had a malignant tumor removed and decided that it was time to start working on his overall health. After a little digging during our consultation, I figured out that the weight loss wasn’t really the focus and he really just wanted to be more healthy. I assured him that once he gets his health in order, the weight loss would come. We set up 2-3 one hour sessions every week and I gave him “homework” to do on the days that we weren’t meeting. Our sessions started out with some basic strength training and core work. His “homework” was to work on running and clean up his diet a bit. My experience with being a trainer at that gym was that we would be extremely lucky if a client did 50% of the things that we recommended during the days that we didn’t meet. This was not the case with Scott.
Sample strength training plan (advanced version)
For a man in his 50’s with little exercise experience in the past, Scott took to the training plan immediately and saw quick results. His training adherence was absolute. He immersed himself in exercise and lost 60 pounds in a few months. His training advanced from basic strength training machines and core work to very advanced free weight exercises, plyometrics, balance training, and running drills. He’d never really run before our sessions started but he found that running was something that he really enjoyed. During one of our post-workout discussions he said that he wanted to train for a marathon. I don’t think he’d even run a 5K at this point and I’d seen plenty of people who ran themselves into injury trying to go from couch to marathon too quickly. I told him to pump the brakes a bit and let’s maybe shoot for a half-marathon first and then work towards a full marathon the following year. I developed a training plan for his first half-marathon and off we went. Scott stuck to the training plan just like he had with everything else I’d given him. We worked on nutrition, hydration, strength, form, cadence, balance…you name it and we worked on it. He loved collecting all the data and analyzing how he could get better. He knocked that half-marathon out of the park and then I knew that he would be ready for a marathon.
Half-marathon training plan
Boston Bound
Scott did his research and found a marathon that he would really enjoy, The Napa Valley Marathon. He figured if he’s going to go all out for this monumental goal it might as well be in a cool place to travel with his wife and get to sample some good wine (after the race of course). He really loved the racing atmosphere during the half-marathon and wanted to incorporate several other shorter races into his training plan. The most difficult thing for me was trying to convince him that these had to be “training” races and he needed to throttle it back a bit to avoid injury. His training leading up to Napa Valley was exactly where I thought it should be. We crossed every “T” and dotted every “I”. Race day was quickly approaching and he was getting anxious. “All the work had been done, now it was just time have fun on race day”, is what I kept trying to drill into his head. Someone’s very first marathon is always tricky. You never know exactly how things go and there’s usually a really steep learning curve after the 1st one. Our goal was to try to maintain 8:30/mile pace for as long as possible and finish under 4 hours. He finished in just under 3:45 and was upset that the back half of the marathon wasn’t within his 8:30/mile pace (he averaged 8:37/mile for the back half)!
Napa Valley took place on March 1st, 2015. On March 2nd, Scott informed me that he was going to run the Boston Marathon. For anyone who has actually qualified for, and run Boston, you know what sort of challenge this is even for a seasoned runner with a lot of years under their belt. I knew there was no convincing him otherwise so I just went along for the ride. The first thing we had to do was figure out what his qualifying time would have to be. For his age group, it was 3:30. That means that he’d have to shave at least 15 minutes off of his marathon time (which was pretty good to begin with). Not easy, but definitely not impossible. The second thing to do was to find the perfect race to qualify in. We did our research and found a local race called Last Chance BQ2 which stands for Boston Qualifier. This race is designed with a Boston Qualifying time in mind. BQ2 was just a short 6 months away and we had some work to do.
I knew that his durability was good since his pace didn’t slow down much during Napa Valley so I knew his running volume (distance per week) was good. I didn’t want to overdo it and have him pile on a ton more miles if he didn’t need to. As the old saying goes “In order to run faster, you have to run faster”. This means that we needed to incorporate some speed work and lactate threshold runs into his training so that he could maintain a faster pace with the same effort that he put out at Napa Valley. This would have to be a masterful training block building up to the BQ2 in order to pull this thing off. After a couple of weeks of recovery time from Napa Valley, we hit the ground running (pun intended). We took all the things we knew worked well with the Napa Valley plan and tweaked a few things to add in some speed work while keeping the long slow runs as a weekly staple. We added in track sessions, tempo runs, and hill repeats. We tested out different fueling strategies and did sweat testing to determine how much hydration was needed. We did gait analysis to identify any inefficiencies with his stride. Out of the 150+ training sessions during those 6 months I think he missed only a few (that’s a training adherence of 98% for those of you keeping score). We made it to race day without any major issues and we were both excited to see what he could do. The race course was a flat 3.2 mile loop which gave me a great opportunity to see how he was looking every 25 minutes or so. The goal pace was 7:45 to 7:50 per mile for as long as possible to squeak out the 3:30 Boston Qualifying time. The strategy was to take the first lap a bit slower and then build speed with every loop and hopefully negative split the back half. Loop 1 was right on track, 7:50 pace. He got tired of the pedestrian pace so he kicked it up a notch and averaged 7:35 pace over the next 20 miles. With 1 loop to go I could tell he was suffering immensely and would have to give it everything he had to keep on going. I yelled a few words of encouragement as he ran passed and started the last loop but he couldn’t hear anything. He was singularly focused on running 3.2 more miles. I positioned myself about 1/4 mile before the finish so I could cheer him in. As long as he kept on running and didn’t have to stop he was going to make it! I kept checking my watch as the other runners were finishing. A couple of minutes past his calculated time had passed and still no Scott. My heart sunk as I thought for sure he pushed too hard in the middle of race and didn’t have anything left to finish. Just as I was giving up hope I saw him round the final turn and head to the finish which was about 1/4 mile away. I couldn’t contain myself. I started sprinting along the side of the race course screaming at the top of my lungs “DON’T SLOW DOWN, YOU’VE GOT THIS, KEEP GOING!!!!”. He finished in 3:22:54 with a Boston Qualifying time by over 7 minutes (that last lap was a shade under 9:00 pace)! He finished 3rd in his age group at a race for Boston Qualifiers. I was more proud than if I had just qualified for Boston myself(which I could never do). I felt like that scene in Rocky where he runs up the stairs in Philly and jumps up and down with his fists raised!
Scott made it into Boston on his first try and completely blew away any expectation I ever had. We had an equally aggressive training plan in place for the Boston Marathon but I knew in the back of my head that he’d been pushing very hard for over a year with no real break. It was bound to catch up in this training block leading up to Boston. In all honesty, Boston is all about the experience of the race and the path getting there. These huge events are impossible to race unless you are a top elite athlete just simply due to the massive volume of people at the start. As suspected the training block didn’t go as planned and small injuries started cropping up. We dialed everything way back and got him to the start line as healthy as possible with the expectation that he wasn’t going to reproduce the BQ2 results. He raced Boston and loved every second of being out on that race course. A calf injury caused some issues late in the race which forced him to slow down considerably but also allowed him to take in all the awesomeness that is the Boston Marathon.
The Boston Marathon Start Line
Running Boston
2016 Boston Marathon Annual Training Plan
Sample of what a week looked like training for Boston
Facing a New Challenge
After crossing Boston off of his Bucket List, Scott set his sights on the next challenge. He heard of the World Marathon Majors and decided that was his next challenge. He quickly checked the Chicago Marathon off his list in 2017 and was entered into the Berlin Marathon when something cropped up. At this point, Scott was a lean mean fighting machine weighing in at about 155 pounds and could deadlift over 300 (pretty damn good for any runner). One day he noticed an odd lump on his abdomen so he went to see the doctor. They assumed it was just a lipoma (fatty tumor) but did a biopsy anyways. The results came back as a malignant melanoma. This was the same sort of tumor that he had removed just prior to coming to see me at the gym for the first time. Melanoma is a tricky beast. If it stays local (as a tumor) and the doctors can remove every little bit of it, there is a good chance that the cancer is gone and no other treatments are needed. If it goes systemic and travels around the body, melanoma is one of the hardest cancers to treat. It does not respond to chemotherapy and radiation so there are few treatment options available. Scott was sent to a fantastic oncologist in Chicago who immediately ordered a bunch of tests and scans. Results of the scans came back and Scott was told that the melanoma had spread throughout his body and infiltrated a number of vital organs. Obviously this was not the diagnosis that he was expecting, especially since he was feeling so good. With a diagnosis of metastatic melanoma, Scott just wanted to know “what’s next?”. As I mentioned before, melanoma is particularly difficult to treat and none of the tumors were in a good place for surgical removal. His oncologist decided on an aggressive treatment plan which included over a year of intense immunotherapy (which seems like the only current treatment option for metastatic melanoma). His oncologist warned him about some of the side effects of treatment but there is no way to know which of the side effects he would get or how severe they would be. From a high level, the immunotherapy dramatically boosts your immune system so that your body can try and fight off the cancer internally. The downside is that the super-charged immune system will also begin to attack healthy tissue and lead to any number of auto-immune like disorders. Treatments started right away and became a monthly ritual. Some months the side effects weren’t too bad and other months they were debilitating. The major side effects that Scott experienced included extreme fatigue, mouth pain, insomnia, loss of appetite, and severe intestinal issues. The immunotherapy destroyed his thyroid, gave him ulcerative colitis, damaged his skin (extreme peeling of the hands), and countless other horrible things. Through this entire treatment process and all the suffering he continued to run. It wasn’t as fast or as far as he ran before…but he still ran. He ran through fatigue that would keep anyone else in bed for weeks at a time. He ran when he wasn’t able to eat because of severe mouth pain and lack of appetite. He ran through extreme bouts of ulcerative colitis. He ran when his body weight went from 155 down into the 120s. Running became less about training and more about a way to deal with the mental stresses. It was his escape from being “sick”. There are many moments in everyone’s life (even throughout the day) where there’s a decision to make. This can be during a race, while at work, in school, during an emergency, during an illness, or even just doing yard work. That decision is “will I continue to fight on or will I take the easy way out and just quit?”. Scott had dealt with this decision time and time again during his marathon training and was very familiar with taking the hard road and fighting on. There was never any question which path he was going to take with this decision. He fought, he suffered, he fought some more, he suffered even more, and he never ever quit. 2 years after the diagnosis of metastatic melanoma Scott’s treatments came to an end and his oncologist declared that he was in remission. It took a few months before the crippling fatigue started to go away but several of the other issues remained (thyroid and colitis).
Kicking Cancer’s Ass!
What Lies Ahead
We’ve run together throughout his treatments and even after they have completed. I enjoy every second that we are out there on the trails together and he enjoys burying me on some of the faster runs. He still plans to complete the World Marathon Majors and is eyeing an Ultra or 2 next year. I’m not exactly sure what lies ahead for Scott but I can’t wait to be a part of it. I do know one thing for sure, every time that I face some difficulties in a race or in training I think about Scott. I think about everything that he went through in training and then in his battle with cancer. Just bearing witness to his tenacity drastically increases my ability to suffer. How can I stop running when he never did. I share his story so that his tenacity can increase your ability to suffer. Ultrarunning is a sport where we are all faced with the decision to quit or keep on going. When you get to that point in your next race I hope that somewhere in the back of your head you think about Scott and how he never gave up and continues to fight for getting better and faster and stronger every day. Scott’s saga will continue on and I look forward to writing more about his incredible journey.
Forever my inspiration