Running In Place

Firstly, my thanks for the comments of encouragement and comfort. This race was the most difficult thing yet in my relatively short time running. I can’t even say what the support and perspective shared meant to me, and moreso, how it really helped me to forgive myself so I could get on with the business of putting the experience to good use! You guys rock, for true.

Nextly, after a day spent yesterday in a state of physical tiredness and emotional flatness, I was ready to hit the road again today. Really I was a little nervous - some part of my brain was trying to convince me that as soon as I started running I would immediately feel like that last mile on Saturday. It didn’t help that the weather was again low 80’sF and very humid. Thankfully, it was pretty cloudy so the beating down sun factor wasn’t there. The flip side of those clouds was that the forecast called for thunderstorms with “deadly lightning” and “damaging winds” (which they later just summarized as “tornado watch”). I got going a little earlier than usual and decided to run in the village by the canal rather than the canal path because I didn’t want to be a mile or two out on a trail if lightning started. I hadn’t run around town since late winter and, as it’s a small place, you have to do alot of looping up, down, and around to get in anything over a mile - but the good part is that if the weather started I was close to my car or the post office or the libraray, etc.

Now let me deviate for a moment and talk a little about what I am trying to figure out with my training here. If I look at my deficits right now in terms of preparing for the Boilermaker, they are:
- Acclimitization: Yeah, I live in central New York State and it just got to be above 65F, like, last week so I am not nearly accustomed to the 80+ and humid we have been having in the last several days. Solution: Keep running. Strap on a water bottle, put on sunscreen, and get used to it.
- Distance: Like I went on about in my last post, I dropped down my mileage to babysit this bratty shin. There has been no such thing as a long run in a few weeks and not getting some distances is scary. I had hoped to be a little overprepared and now I will scramble to be just about ready. Solution: Well, I labored and labored over a training schedule for the next 5 weeks that would get my long runs increased without jacking up weekly mileage too quickly and screwing my stupid hateful shin….. (I mean, I love you, shin. Please be kind to me. Loooove you).
- Pace: Blah. Always a problem for me. In the first couple weeks of training, I was finally starting to get a handle on my different efforts and how they translated into what pace I was running. And more importantly, I was learning when and how to exert which effort for which outcome. Then I ran my 5K PR and, I swear to god, ever since then I have had a really hard time finding my slower pace again. Sure, maybe my body is naturally wanting to run a little faster - and that’s great - but, as I discovered on Saturday, not every run can be at 5K race pace. And, unfortunately, since I have been spending the last 3 weeks running no more than 5K distances, I’m having a hard time finding a pace that can sustain me for longer.

So, back to today - I headed out thinking I would do 30-40 minutes and just take it as it came. I wanted to concentrate on going slow, like really slow, because even though I wasn’t planning on it being a long run at all, I wanted to get reconnected with control of the speedometer.

Now, here’s where you can tell me I’m a psycho - the first mile I’m thinking ok, I’m going slow slow slow, take it slow. But I feel like I’m going fast and so I put a hill in there and then run slow back down the hill. The Garmin goes off and it’s 12:16 and I’m all kind of disappointed and thinking god, I’m going so slow. **sigh** So the next 2 miles are 10:31 and 10:35 and that’s with all the hills I could find in town thrown in. So I can’t figure it out. It seemed equally hot and sticky and hard all the while, and this was with me supposedly keeping my effort down. I’d like to be proud but really I’m just befuddled.

To make a long story longer - it was a good run really. I ran strong in the heat, I managed to scare up 5 hills of short distance but fairly steep incline, and I ran a couple of fast (for me) miles. That wasn’t my goal but the fact that the 2nd and 3rd miles came at nearly the same level of effort as the first slow mile is good. But it won’t sustain me for a long run - for sure, I know that!

Tomorrow with the club will probably be a “fast” 3 miles as they are now doing timed development runs for the summer, but Thursday I plan to do 6 in a really controlled way. My plan is to do 6 in a way that I finish strong - then, on Satuday, I have an 8K race in which - I hope - I can find the place between my faster 3’s and my slower 6.

Wahoo! Am I obssessing a little?? Maybe that’s the natural response - the overwhelming urge to plan plan plan, fix fix fix. The reality, I guess, is that each day, and each run, is its own. And the beauty is that even though right now, 100% of my focus is on July 10, I’ll be running again on July 12 or 13, and then beyond.