Running In Place

Today was interval day which I was feeling kind of whiney about and almost started my old game of finding ways to busy myself with other things and blow it off. Fortunately, Runner-Me piped up and said dude, you are in training! You wanna run the Boilermaker, right? And you wanna be well prepared and run it well, right? And what about that 20K in New Haven with Dianna and the gang?? Gonna crap out your training for that too??? Well????? Then Runner-Me kicked Whiney-Me’s ass and off I went.

The plan was to do right this week what I did not do right last week, which was 5 x 3 min. at 80-90% with 1 min. recoveries. Last Wednesday I got all dyslexic and did 3 x 5 min. and was not able to sustain the effort well at all. It felt scary and not at all productive.

Today was better. I started out with an easy 5 minute warm-up, walked for a short bit while I fiddled with my watch, then set off on the first 3 minutes - going from this isn’t so bad to I wanna stop I wanna stop I wanna stop in not too long. I was working at a level of effort that was not all out but maybe close to it. At the end of each 3 minutes I was spent and my recovery jog was at a crawl pace. My mantra is: I can do anything for _______ (fill in 3 minutes, 10 minutes, a mile, etc). The last 2 sets were, not surprisingly, the hardest. The one minute recovery jog wasn’t nearly long enough for me to “recover” in but I didn’t know if that was something I should toy with. How much recovery is recovery? If I make it longer or walk it instead of jog it does it minimize the benefit of the work-out? Or is it worse to start again with the hard effort when you haven’t really had the time to catch your breath? These things I don’t know, so I just did it. Once I was finished and walking, then I recovered very quickly, so quickly it surprised me that I had my breath back and my heart settled down so soon. Then I started to worry that meant I hadn’t given a hard enough effort, but in reality I knew that wasn’t true. I just like to have something to worry about.

Time: 20:00
Distance: 1.95
Avg. pace: 10:15 (maybe next time I’ll time the intervals - don’t know yet how much clockwatching I want to do with this)
Effort: 9 - 9.5 of 10

Now just some brief thoughts on the weather: The whole time I was running it was raining. Back and forth between moderate showers to downpour the entire time. Not surprisingly, I was the only one on the path which was very cool because the vain part of me was glad there was no one around to hear the gasping and coughing and hawking (and I wish I could learn how to spit properly and not with all the dribble and…well never mind). As I was walking the 1/2 mile back to the car, and stopping to stretch, and soaked to the skin I thought that, of all the times that I have conjured reasons and rationales to blow off runs, very few times was it because of the weather. The weather’s not always a complementary factor to the run but it’s always a part of the experience, for better or worse. And the conditions that, under daily circumstances, I might lament, like rain or snow or cold , can be seen in an entirely new way when I immerse myself in them. So as I walked back to the car, leisurely, unconcerned about getting wet because I already was, I looked at how green everything is becoming, and watched the robins who were also unconcerned by the rain, and thought about the whole ocean to atmosphere to earth to ocean cycle (what little I know about it) and was all in awe and shit. And I thought about the multitude of times in my life when I avoided the rain, or cursed it, or called it a bad day because there was rain - and today I said thank you to the rain, or for the rain, or both. And then I walked out into the parking lot where 3 kids from the nearby high school, parked for lunch break, looked at me in my soaking wet self like I was the most insane person they ever saw. That’s cool