“I like to go on this route for my easy bread-and-butter runs: It gives me the option to run up to 10 miles on rolling hills, mostly without seeing anybody,” Allan says.

Now that coronavirus has upended our lives, we’re all being forced to adjust to our new work/life routines — however permanent or temporary they may be — while maintaining a healthy sense of balance and routine amid the chaos. Obviously, this includes continuing to make time to run!

This blog series chronicles the lives of PPTC-ers during the COVID-19 crisis: This week’s profile is of Allan Co. If you’d like to be featured in a future post, email blog@pptc.org.

Describe a day in your life during social distancing and/or quarantining.

My husband and I have been working remotely since the week of March 16: We recently decided to relocate to our house upstate for a while. With an almost-three-year old, we're still figuring out our daily routines, which include new balances of work and child care.

So far, our days far have looked like this:

-Breakfast

-One hour of self-play with toys while adults work

-One hour of TV time while adults work

-One hour of family time (including preparing and eating lunch/dinner, crafts, or other activity. Kid naps while adults work, then repeat. Two cycles usually means seven hours of work, and if we're ambitious, we wake up early to get a head start.

We're both working off laptops on our kitchen island right now, and use our spare room for conference calls.

Allan’s makeshift standing desk. “Since I took this picture, I’ve started using a Levit8 standing desk - I rotate through four different setups depending on the tasks I have at hand,” he says.

How has coronavirus affected your training? Are you doing more of the same, nothing at all, or more cross training and less running?

I had planned on running the New Bedford Half Marathon on March 15 as a tune-up for the Boston Marathon on April 20. After everything was canceled, I decided to time-trial a half marathon last Saturday, and got Ted to pace me to a strong and meaningful PR. You can view this activity or follow me on Strava, here.

I took a few days after that to reassess what "training" meant during uncertainty, and started running again on March 19 with an easy hour. I'm fortunate that I can run upstate without encountering other people, especially early in the morning, and I have a treadmill at home to supplement that.

As long as I am able to, I plan to train as I normally do, imagining a marathon on my calendar in a few months.

How are you spending your self-quarantine?

During the week, we're trying to balance getting enough work done with keeping our daughter engaged. We're realistic about television, but try, with varying success, for no more than an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening. This means thinking of some activities beyond playing with toys and crafts.

Yesterday, we planned our vegetable garden and planted seeds as a family. I'm also trying to stay connected by checking in with a lot of my friends by text or video calls (or replying to random Facebook posts), and practicing self-care, either by running or treating myself to random things, like a new portable standing desk, vegetable seeds for our garden, or a new shower head for my bathroom :)

What do you and your husband do for a living?

Another picture of Alan’s run route. However, “I like to do my workouts at the high school track, or in a local nature preserve with flat roads,” he says.

My husband, Jimmy, works for a large tech company in people development (HR) focusing on internal learning programs for their employee force. I'm an architect and project manager for Break Ground, a non-profit affordable housing developer that builds and sustains affordable housing in NYC and provides supportive social services from homeless outreach to resident and community support services. My work ranges from managing teams of designers and contractors to engaging building staff, clients, and other departments in our organization.

How have your jobs changed (if at all) since you began working from home? And what did you do for childcare before?

Jimmy's job does not seem to have changed much other than the fact that he's working from home. Most of his work has always involved virtual/video conferencing or computer work, though he does miss the social interaction he gets from being at the office.

My work usually involves meetings with teams of designers and contractors, or site visits to buildings or construction sites, so things are quite a bit different. We've moved all our meetings online using Webex, so we can share drawings and images; we mark up drawings using PDF editors. Site meetings are canceled. But as an organization, we're still functioning: Construction has been deemed an "essential" industry (though some major contractors have pulled their workforce), and our homeless outreach continues. (On March 27, Governor Cuomo halted all non-essential construction in the state, but construction of affordable housing is included as essential, as is human services.)

Do you get dressed in your usual business attire to WFH? If you don't need to do that, how do you stay comfortable?

My work attire is usually pretty simple: Dark jeans and a gray sweater or polo depending on the weather. Because I interact with a wide range of stakeholders and communities, I generally try to look neat but unintimidating. I'm basically in the same attire these days, but am wearing cozy house slippers instead of shoes :)

Are you excited to get back to racing? What do you think your mindset will be like when your marathons are rescheduled?

I definitely need/want something on my calendar ASAP, so in a way, yes. But with Boston being scheduled for September, I'm not as excited about the race as I was this past winter. Marathons occupy very specific places in my mind (and on my calendar), and a September race seems off to me. It also is only one month before Chicago, which I planned on running again in October.

In terms of self care: What was the last running-related treat/indulgence you treated yourself to?

I stocked up on Gu in bulk (24 packs of Salted Caramel and Espresso Love), as well as Honey Stinger Waffles, my go-to morning pre run snack. I also think of my new showerhead as a running indulgence! LOL.

Since most races have gotten cancelled, do you get equally as excited about PR's during training?

This is a really tough question! I haven't had any tough training runs since everything was canceled except for the time trial we set up. Leading up to it, I was hitting workouts faster than I ever had, so I arranged the time trial because I needed closure on the training I had put in thus far. I was very happy and excited with how the trial went, but it was still bittersweet. Even though I have the Garmin data, and a witness to corroborate the effort, it's oddly not the same. Time will tell if I get excited when I start putting together workouts. Since I answered these questions, I have managed to put in a couple of strong workouts that I was very pleased about; if anything though, they just made me more enthusiastic about racing again.

Text and photos: Allan Co
Edited and produced by: Alison Kotch

A Day In The Life: Allan Co