Training Log: Peter Bromka

I first spoke to Peter Bromka in 2019 and asked him for training advice. He was a bit older than me– I was pushing 30, and he was pushing 40– and I wanted to talk to someone who wasn’t still fueled by the piss and vinegar of the newly anointed, the young guns. I wanted to talk to someone who had been jaded and disappointed and come out the other side faster.

In high school Peter ran and played soccer, then went all in on running while attending a DIII college. His college friends on the soccer team loved the balance DIII sports provided: you could still party and compete and study without much worry. Peter didn’t understand balance: he wanted all-in on running. He trained hard, raced well, but often got injured, and quit shortly after graduating. 

He found his way back to it in his early thirties when he decided to train for a marathon with his friends. He set a relatively humble goal for a collegiate runner: qualify for the Boston Marathon, which he did. Like many marathoners, he swore never to do another, then promptly signed up for one. He set the slightly-more-ambitious goal of sub-six-minute pace, which he did (he ran 2:35). After that, the next logical goal was under 2:30, which he did, then 2:25, which took a few attempts, then 2:20, which he did, then qualify for the Olympic Trials Marathon, which he failed to do three times.   

Peter’s training is disappointingly simple: run 100 miles a week, run 20 miles on the weekend, do one workout each week that scares you, and run with friends as often as possible. That’s it. Rinse and repeat each season and you’ll improve. It’s not complex, but it’s ludicrously difficult to do once, much less twelve times (which he did).

Perhaps the most salient part of Bromka’s career was its peak, where he tried three times to qualify for the Olympic Trials and came within a minute each time– once only two seconds off. To some, that might look like the most heartbreaking and frustrating part of the sport: that you can go all-in, do everything right, and still fail to meet your goals. To Peter though, it’s a gift: he went all in, did everything right, and was shown precisely where his limits lay. Most of us will spend our later years wondering what could have been, but Peter won’t. He can quit, satisfied that he’d asked the most of himself without compromise.

(He will still be training for Boston in the spring) 

“What started out as a game turns out to be a lifestyle that I love.”