Marathon plans to go south

After the first leg of summer Phish tour ended, it was time to start making marathon plans again.

I was not traveling west and south for the second leg of the tour, so August was strictly about starting my training for a December marathon. I had already picked it out - the Mangrove Marathon in Cape Coral, Fla.

Cape Coral is a city on Florida's Gulf coast, just south of Fort Myers. My grandfather moved there more than thirty years ago when it was still small and up-and-coming. Today, it is a rather large and booming city.

The plan was to run the marathon and have a nice visit with Grandpa, as well as my aunt who also lives in town. Gramps turns 89 this year and this would be the first time for him to see me run a race. Not only that, but judging by last year's times, I could possibly be a contender for Top Three. That would make him proud of his grandson, no?

My mom and I bought our plane tickets and reserved our hotel room, and I registered for the race. In the meantime, I spent August and September training hard. That 3:04 PR of mine is now three years old and I am ready to break it. I did a 17-miler in 2:02 and a 2:32 20-miler, so my long game is intact; and I have been doing 2:55 800-meter intervals, so my short sprint game is still on point, too. I was keeping Gramps posted about my progress and he was excited about me coming down there for the event.

A lot of things can go wrong in the weeks leading up to a marathon. In 2010, I pulled a hamstring three weeks before the Boston Marathon. In 2008 and 2009, I got very ill, with a high fever and flu-like symptoms the week before the New Jersey and Eisenhower (in Kansas) marathons.

In all those cases, though, I still managed to get to the race and do my best, and even make something great out of it (like my short movie "One Man's Boston" and the PRs in New Jersey and Kansas).

But on Sept. 30, while everything was going along perfectly, the one thing I could have never fathomed would happen, happened.