Once more unto the breach (for) dear friends.
January 18, 2010 | 10:57 am
Your body forgets how this stuff feels. Maybe because the thing is so uncomfortable, it's like a defense mechanism. The training week was highlighted by my first "real" workout since October 12, 2008. I put the goofy looking quotation marks around "real" because, although it certainly felt like a workout, it really should be a walk in the park; regardless of how long it's been. It was last Thursday. The workout was pretty simple; just a forty minute run with fifteen minutes of tempo, broken up into three five minute reps. About halfway through the second rep I had this sinking feeling. It had been so long since I'd felt it that at first it confused me. When it finally dawned on me what it was, I had to smile; it felt like the beginning of cross country season! It was the feeling of preparing for ten kilometre races. Through the mud. In the rain. In the snow. Painfully running slow (running painfully slow?). Cross country takes courage; I'm not particularly courageous. The start of cross country seasons made me feel ill. It's a dull, throbbing pain. Kind of like a headache. But everywhere. So needless to say, this was the workout that really made me realize what I have committed to doing. I don't want to say that I started to re-think it; I definitely knew what I was getting into, but it definitely made me miss the track.
Which brings me to my next point. It took me less than a week to go back on my decision to not step foot on a track. Last Tuesday I was at the Dalpex. One of the athletes I coach was doing a workout with the group there and I went to watch. I got to talking with a friend of mine, John Corbit. John and I used to race quite a bit in high school, and then while he was at Dalhousie and I was UVic, we kept racing each other at the CIS level. He crashed at my place in Victoria once or twice when he would come out for the West Coast Series. He was talking about the 1000m he was racing on Sunday and I realized that John is in a league completely by himself over that distance in Nova Scotia. Suddenly I found myself offering to pace the race for him, telling him I would bring him through 600m. It wasn't until I got home that I realized it had been almost two years since I had run that fast, especially indoors! But, come Sunday, I found myself toeing the line at the start of the men's 1K. It went fairly well, I was comfortable running 1:27 for 600m. The only problem: It made me miss the track more than I have since I "retired". I didn't want to stop. I know I would have fallen apart in a pool of lactic acid had I tried to finish the race, but I really, REALLY wanted to keep going. My heart was racing all night afterward. I likely got about two hours of sleep last night because of how excited you get when you're flying around the track. And when I did sleep, all I had was running dreams! John ended up running 2:30. He won by four or five seconds, but he can go faster. Much faster. And he will.
I ran the 600m in the Mizuno Wave Ronins. I had never worn a Mizuno flat before and was very impressed. It felt almost as light as a spike, but my calves aren't sore at all today. It also felt a little bit more substantial than other super light racing flats I've worn. I feel like I could actually do a fair amount of training in them without getting injured. But I'm not ready to do that yet! All in all, I was very happy with the shoe, and the orange colour scheme was pretty sweet too!
Also, completely unrelated to my sad little comeback- congratulations to Antigonish's Eric Gillis who ran 2:13 for the marathon in Houston yesterday!
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