I have signed up for the Twilight 5-K, which will take place exactly one week from today, and even though it is "only a 5-K" in the words of one of my running friends, I have applied the same serious training techniques that I would for a longer race. Thus I have been running a mixture of long runs on Saturdays (10 miles for several weeks), hills on Mondays, and intervals on Thursdays. The classic distance for intervals for a 5-K is 400 meters, and it is a workout that I have been doing for years leading up to 5-Ks and 10-Ks. In the past weeks I have worked up to eight of them, and reviewing my running log for this month, my average time has been 2:14, 2:14, 2:16, 2:12, and 2:14. Those are pretty consistent times and I feel that I could not have gone much faster. I managed to actually hit 2:09 twice over this period of time, never faster. If I had enough time before the race, I would take the next step and decrease the rest time between intervals.
The other thing I have been doing, more in anticipation of the half marathon I would like to run in October rather than this 5-K, is running a fast mile late in the long run, as I have mentioned before in this blog. I have always felt that this trains the body to run hard, even when tired. I haven't done as good a job of recording these miles, but my log shows that I ran a 10:33 mile two weeks ago (in a long run at an average place of 12 or 13 minutes per mile).
It was a humid morning and all of the other Saturday runners had completed their runs, and I realized as I was coming down Fifth Street that I was nearing the beginning of a relatively flat one-mile route that I have often used to time myself. So almost without thinking, I hit the LAP button on my watch and started to run fast. Everything felt strong and smooth, and some of the stiffness and little niggles I had experienced earlier seemed to melt away. I thought I would push a little and see if I could sustain this pace for a mile, and I got into a rhythm, powering up the Satulah Ridge Road hill, and on around the lake, eyeing the familiar markers on the road as I passed them. I was expecting that I might be able to break 10 minutes. I hit the LAP button again and saw that I had just run this mile in a surprising 8:18. I thought that perhaps I had misread the numbers, but when I finished up after a cool-down mile, I read the history of this run and confirmed it. Then my mind began playing tricks (as it can do after hard running!) and I thought I may have made a mistake about the distance. Should I have started at that earlier mark, across from Spring Street? Had I run only 0.75 or 0.875 miles? So I actually drove the course in my car and confirmed the distance.
How can this be? My average quarter-mile time was in excess of 2:05, four of them, without pause. It was a puzzle, but one that I have been enjoying thinking about much more than I would have if I had run an 11-minute mile. What was different this morning? It was just as humid, and on top of that I had already run seven miles (I normally run a one-mile warm-up on interval days). I am thinking of sending this data to Morris, who is even more OCD than I am but an experienced Coach. But I suspect he would say, "You've been running your intervals way too slowly!" Or perhaps I should plan on warming up for seven miles next week!
I can only conclude that I was having a good day! Yes, I have seen this before - runners have bad days, and they have good days, and it often has nothing to do with temperature or humidity or fuel or hydration or any other factors than can be analyzed.
And I do enjoy this side of running, this analyzing, just as much as I do those days when I take long, leisurely rambles through dappled sunlight, along the shore of a lake filled with waterlilies, or laughing and joking with running friends. I enjoy timing, and measuring, and trying to improve in the approach to a race where I will test myself against others and against myself. So I spent a little time using Race Predictors and Running Calculators. I found a great calculator on a site called Running for Fitness, which extrapolated my mile time to many distances, based on my age and my gender.
That is very encouraging (and a runner should find encouragement wherever he can). According to this highly detailed chart, I should be able to run next week's 5-K in 28:52 (I had been hoping to merely break 30 minutes). And I should be able to run a half-marathon in 2:12:21.
If I have a good day.
But I don't want to get ahead of myself. I only want to do the best I can, and be thankful that there may still be some good days in store. As do we all.
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