The 'J Word'
March 08, 2010 | 2:53 pm
This past week was the heaviest week of training I've had in over a year. And I'm definitely paying the price today. Tuesday I did three sets of three 300s between 43 and 46 seconds. The third set was tough, but I managed to make my last rep my fastest. I would like to have been 42ish, but it just wasn't in the cards that day. Thursday was twenty minutes of tempo. I hate running at tempo pace; it's hard enough that it's not comfortable, but slow enough that you don't get that feeling of cutting through the air. It's just a death march. I was running right around 5:10 mile pace for the last ten minutes though, so I'd say things are coming around aerobically. Well, as much as they possibly can for a baby like me. Saturday was a bit of a wake-up call in that it was a workout I've done a few times before while being in pretty good shape. It was two sets of four times 400m. I ran all of them between 62 and 65 seconds, mostly 64s. That's only four minute 1500m pace, which tells me I'm still a ways off of where I'd like to be. But as the days pass and I actually think realistically, I should be pretty happy about the workout considering I was sitting around doing nothing four months ago...
Really there was nothing of note that happened this week. Most of my runs felt a little sluggish, but that's exactly how they're supposed to feel if you're doing the workouts properly. Friday and Sunday in particular were tough to get through; I felt like I was running in ski boots. Wednesday, on the other hand, saw me experiencing some feelings I haven't had in the a few years. Maybe more than a few years. I didn't bring a watch and I went through Shubie Park, where I used to do most of my runs throughout high school. The group I was in back then is really what got me into running fairly seriously. I did almost all of my off day runs with Jeff Englehutt, Owen Marcotte, and John Tramble. As I was running along (likely too slowly), I got to thinking about that group of guys again. John is out in BC teaching at a high school there, Jeff is working on his second degree, and Owen is engaged and has a five month old named Roman. As you get older, being competitive in the sport requires a LOT more work. You start having to run more than once a day, you have to spend some time in the weight room, basically your entire day needs to revolve around training. My coach at UVic, Brent Fougner, used to say after workouts that "your next workout starts as soon as you finish your cool down from this one". And he was absolutely right. Running through Shubie thinking about my old high school team brought back memories of why each of us actually got started with the sport. Just running through the woods, not caring about how many miles you cover or how fast you cover them. Not worried about recovery, strength training, or diet. Looking forward to race days for the chance to simply compete against one another; not caring about standards to get into certain meets or the hundredths of seconds that can make the difference between making teams and getting paid, and just being another guy who got beat by the guy who won. I'm not complaining about my time as a competitive runner; I wouldn't trade that for the world, but it was pretty cool to get that feeling back of just running on Wednesday. It's not something I would want every time out, I'm too competitive of a person for that. It would eventually get stale, and I love the screaming pain of a good interval workout too much. But I did really enjoy myself going for what I suppose would be called a jog.
...as much as I hate that word.
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