48 Races Later: Our 2025 Running Year in Review

In this episode of The Back of the Pack Podcast, we crack open our 2025 race calendar like a scrapbook with sweat stains and start pulling out the stories. Forty-eight races, forty-seven race days, and enough finish lines to make our bib drawer file for workers’ comp. We dig into the “stat snacks” too: 339.95 miles of racing, an average rhythm of basically a race every week, and a whole lot of half-marathon living. We relive the highs (hello Top City Half as our fastest 13.1), the gritty ones (yes, Summer Argo, we remember you), and the weird little coincidences that only show up when we actually look at our year in one big pile. Like running two different halves and landing on the exact same finish time, or clocking the same 5K time twice like our watch got stuck in a time loop. There were double-header weekends, holiday races, travel races, hometown classics, and at least one event whose name tried to convince our spreadsheet we ran farther than we did. But the real story isn’t the pace, it’s what each course dragged out of us: patience, pride, stubbornness, gratitude, and a few laughs when the plan went off the rails. If you’ve ever wondered what consistency looks like for a back-of-the-pack runner, this episode is the honest, imperfect, strangely beautiful proof. Come for the numbers, stay for the stories.