A year ago this weekend I ran the fastest half marathon of my life. Three years ago I ran a marathon.

Today I ran two miles and then had to walk two miles home. The whole point of the run was to push the tempo and wear myself out (I can run 8 miles at an easy pace), but it’s still safe to say that I’m not in ideal shape at the moment.

My fitness level isn’t exactly a new revelation, but after today’s run I did get a different perspective on what I’m going to do about it.

A few weeks after running the half marathon last year (a 1:43:08 in Raleigh, NC), I was starting to ramp up my mileage to train for a full marathon when I came down with a stress fracture in my right foot. Being the genius that I am, I ignored what to most would be conventional wisdom and ran a 5K with the injury. It was my fastest 5K ever (20:24), but definitely not worth the pain that followed.

I sat on the couch for nearly eight weeks while the foot healed and went from being in the best shape of my life with great fitness habits and a sense of momentum to being completely and utterly lazy. Unfortunately, nothing about the rest of this year has shaken that attitude (the ridiculously hot summer did not help).

What worked last year was running a half marathon in the early spring, transitioning to 5Ks through early summer and then focusing again on the half for the fall.

A few weeks ago I officially canceled plans to run a half this fall (see fitness, lack of, above) and decided I needed to follow last year’s playbook to get things back on track: Run a 5K at the end of this month, and use that as a springboard to getting in half shape for a late-winter race.

But walking home after failing in today’s run I realized I have been thinking about the wrong plan. I’m not in spring 2009 shape, but rather more like where I was in the fall of 2008.

I had just moved back from Florida where a combination of sleep deprivation and a lack of race motivation meant that I could barely run four miles at a time before being absolutely exhausted. That laziness can in some way be traced to the foot injury I battled all through 2007, which caused me to not run at all the prior winter (’07/’08).

See a pattern? Foot injury + healing time + slow return to running + lack of good habits = out of shape autumn. That’s how it was in the fall of 2008, and only today did that click in my head.

So now it’s time to look at what I did that fall that got me in good shape for the spring of 2009 and all the success that followed. Good thing I kept a log of all of my runs.

High-five to 2008 self.