David Taylor Gonzales

The last 6 months has brought a lot of health challenges for our family. My wife has had mastitis 5 or 6 times since our son was born. He’s been growing and mostly healthy which we are incredibly grateful for, but adjusting to two children has taken a lot out of my wife. I see it in her eyes in the morning before I go to work. She gives all of herself to our children everyday. It’s such a tragically beautiful parallel of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. She continues to pour so much of herself, more than I want her to give, to our kids. She’s a mother. It’s what she does.

She sent me a text last week while I was at work, “I think running the half marathon this year is an unrealistic goal for me. If you still want to run it, you certainly can and we will come to support you, otherwise I’m up for trying to do the Potter’s House 5K.” Part of me was anticipating this conversation, and I thought I’d be bummed when we’d talk about it but when I read that text, I got excited. I realized I care more about running with her and with our kids than any individual goals I set out to accomplish. 2025 was defined by my marathon last year. It was an individual goal that required a lot of effort and sacrifice on the part of me, my wife, and our kids. While I’m proud of what I was able to do that day, I know I’ll be more proud of making running and exercise a consistent habit in our family culture than I would be by throwing down a fast time at Rock the Parkway. There will always be other races to run by myself but how many more races will I get to do with Lane while pushing our kids in a double stroller?

I have never trained for a 5K before. I’ve run 5 races of that distance but usually they’ve been random and sporadic, or part of training for a bigger race (e.g. Run for Hope 5K in 2025 was used as a speed training workout for the marathon). I am excited to add more quality, high aerobic sessions to my weeks. It’ll be a very different stimulus than what I did most of 2025.

So far, I’m enjoying the speed training. My volume is lower than the last training cycle which has allowed me to go harder more often so instead of one speed/quality training day per week, I’m doing two. This added high aerobic stress has taught me a lot about my pace ranges for tempo/threshold runs, how to hold back in early intervals, how to pace my repeats correctly, etc. It’s fun to try and learn new things.

Keep Going!