Josh Izewski ran his first race since his 2:10 personal best at the Houston Marathon just 6 weeks ago, and Dan Schaffer kicked off his 2025 racing campaign at the Gate River Run on Saturday. For Dan the race was a foray into longer events and for Josh it was stepping down from the marathon distance.
We typically wouldn’t bounce back from a marathon that quickly to race a high level event like the Gate River Run. However, Josh ran Houston on a very short buildup and recovered very well from the race itself. Some of the post marathon recovery is just as much recovery from the training as from the race. For Josh, he only had 4-5 weeks of hard training for Houston so his body felt strong quickly afterward.
Josh ran his way forward throughout the race, slowly moving up through the field and finishing in 44:11 and taking 11th place. Dan was just behind in 12th, clocking 44:25, a strong showing over 9.3 miles for an athlete that over the course of his career is used to running 3k races this time of year.
Both Dan and Josh will be jumping over to the track at the Raleigh Relays at the end of the month where they’ll race the 5,000m The following week Josh will be in Washington DC to run the Cherry Blossom 10 miler and Dan will head back south for the Cooper River Bridge Run 10k in Charleston, SC.
You can find full results for the Gate River Run here.