I love you...but we are never doing that again

Valentine's Day addition to recap Black Canyon and Mesa 1/2 Marathon

So, remember how we said we’d drop a newsletter every Friday? And then last Friday came and went, and all you got from us was crickets? Well, here’s the long-winded, very valid excuse for why your inbox remained empty.

We’re not big on excuses, but since you committed to our Substack (albeit a very low-commitment commitment), we feel it’s only fair to provide some context for our failure to deliver.

In our last edition, we hyped up Eli’s debut 100K at Black Canyon. What we didn’t mention—perhaps because one of us was having last-minute cold feet (not naming names because, well, marriage and it is Valentine’s Day, after all)—was that Tabor was also racing the same day… 90 minutes away at the Mesa Road Half Marathon. In hindsight, a logistical disaster waiting to happen. But alas, we are still very much young, dumb, and in love.

Now, being who we are, we naturally thought, No problem! We got this. The plan: fly in, get Eli dialed with pacers, ice, fuel, start-line logistics. Then, Tabor would jump in the car, drive two hours to Mesa for her 6:30 AM start, race a half marathon, run five miles back to the rental car, and then book it back to Black Canyon to crew Eli for the rest of the day. Easy, right? Wrong.

Turns out, what sounded seamless in our heads was actually a logistical nightmare, especially for head crew chief, Tabor. Her race was supposed to be a marathon simulation—train through it, no taper, see how it goes. But life threw in a few curveballs (as it does), leading to some last-minute chaos for Eli’s race. And because she wanted Eli to be as fresh as possible for sixty-fucking-miles in the desert, she took on all the stress, planning, and last-minute scrambling herself. Then she proceeded to drive an absurd amount in the 24 hours surrounding her race. None of this was ideal.

On top of that, we’re both very invested in how the other does. We aren’t the type to just switch off and not worry. So instead of Tabor sleeping before her race, she was lying awake running through an endless checklist: Did Eli label his bottles correctly? Is two bags of ice enough? Did we get the Vaseline for chafing?! Meanwhile, Eli—without his emotional support person to double-check everything—was stressing about Tabor driving solo at 3 AM and then racing hard before rushing back to crew him. It was a whole thing.

As you might’ve guessed, Tabor felt meh and just tempoed the half marathon. Nothing spectacular, but got it done. Eli, on the other hand, was still in the thick of battle—literally and figuratively. He started off on fire, leading the race under course record pace. And then… he actually started overheating. (Maybe Tabor’s overnight ice-stressing was justified?!). His day got progressively harder, and he went from first place to finishing fourth—still just over the previous year’s course record, but not the execution we had in mind.

So, were these results what we wanted? Nope. But did we deserve them? Absolutely. Because here’s the truth: we like to believe we can do it all, have it all, and be it all. But this weekend was a perfect demonstration that you can’t. You can half-ass a lot of things and get okay results. But to get incredible results, you have to WHOLE-ASS it. We half-assed this weekend, and it showed…not delivering your weekly Substack being the most important loss.

The big takeaway? We don’t always need to race when the other is racing. Sometimes, the best way to support each other is to fully commit to just one role—either racer or crew. No more splitting focus. No more trying to juggle it all. Moving forward, if we aren’t doing the same event, one of us is racing, and the other is supporting.

We love each other, and to truly help each other succeed, we need to be smart—not just sign up for races for the sake of doing them. So, 2025 is officially The Year of the WHOLE ASS.

Thanks for reading our bag of excuses. We hope you take something from our mistakes—don’t do as we do… be young, smart, and in love!

Happy Valentine’s Day!