2020 was supposed to be a great year for running. I was finally going to run Boston. I had a series of races I was excited about over the course of the year. My family was going to spectate the Olympic Marathon Trials in Atlanta, and then enjoy watching the Olympics later that year. Kipchoge and Bekele were going to race in London.

Of course, very little of that happened. We did spectate the marathon trials in Atlanta, but other than that COVID stopped almost everything. Races didn’t matter, and easy runs required more consideration than ever before (Do I wear a mask? Can I run with other people? How do I pass walkers safely?).

I’d been training for marathons at least once a year since 2016 and had built my routine around that process and it was suddenly gone, like so much else. Running felt silly, unimportant. Still, in the early weeks of the pandemic I forced myself out the door to run at least three or four miles almost every day. One foot in front of the other, keep it simple. Sometimes I ran with my wife but mostly I ran alone. On most days that was the only time I left the house.

I ran two virtual races in the spring and one December. I appreciated the mental challenge but I missed the race experience and had a hard time building a training cycle around them. I missed a meaningful leaderboard and the rush of adrenaline from the crowd at the start of a race.

In the summer I slogged through the heat and humidity, keeping to a regular weekly cycle: easy day, speed day, rest day, tempo run, easy day, long run, easy day. Repeat. In the fall I did a cycle with my coach again, with harder workouts but the same rhythm. These months were about holding onto one normal routine when everything else around me had turned upside down. I felt anxiety about hard tempos and loved the feeling of hitting 800 repeats in a similar split time. I had some great long runs and blew up on others.

I want to say running gave me a sense of peace, but that wouldn’t be true. Peace proved hard to come by in 2020. Running gave me something to do that I could control. I could pick the workouts. I could pick when I ran. I cold pick how I felt about running. Six repeats of 800m with a 400m jog in between. Five miles at 7-7:20 per mile pace. Breathe in, breathe out. Focus on form. Be ready when races come back.

Now it’s 2021. Small races are starting to pop up, but they look different than before and I am not comfortable racing in a crowd yet. Maybe things will be different this spring or in the fall. With the chaos in Washington last week and the death toll from COVID mounting, thinking about racing feels self-indulgent. I am still running, though. Ten miles this morning out and back on the greenway, pushing for a negative split so when I do race again I can better control my pace. Who knows when that will be, and I am not sure I care. The workout was on the calendar and I did it, just like I will tomorrow. No matter what else comes.