Training for Something

The wind has diminished over the past three days, a little bit on each day.  Yesterday it dropped from 25 mph to 15 mph, and today it was down to 5 mph.  At the same time, the temperature has dropped, from 45 to 35 to 33 this morning, so cold that the dune-top deck was partially frozen, yet it has felt warmer each day.   The wind is spectacularly steady out here when a cold front moves in.  We both have vivid memories of running the Crystal Coast Half Marathon in March of 2018 and crossing that high Atlantic Beach bridge.  I wrote about it in my blog:

The sustained wind speed was 30 mph, with gusts up to 40 mph, the toughest winds I have faced in nearly 200 races; at one point, crossing the bridge directly into the headwind, it felt like someone was standing in front of me with a hand pushing on my chest.

It hasn't been quite that bad so far this year, but I do not doubt that it will before we leave.  It prompted me to look up the Beaufort Wind Scale (named after an Irishman, Francis Beaufort, rather than Atlantic Beach's neighboring city) which describes in ascending numbers the strength of the wind, from Calm to Hurricane.  In the Carolina brogue, they call the former "slick calm."  And they have a lot of names for Hurricanes.

According to the Beaufort scale, we were running in a Near Gale during that race.  But this morning it was very pleasant, temperatures in the mid-40s, and we both completed four miles.  I went down to the Picnic Area and completed four "Picnic Area Intervals" (see post of November 23), twice as many as last week and just a little bit faster.

That desire to improve can get a runner in a lot of trouble if he is not careful, especially an aging runner like me.  I have seen this same attitude operating in many of the runners I know, especially those who race often.  There always seems to be a deep need to run just a little bit faster, a little fit farther, a little bit harder than the last time.  Out here in the winter, encouraged by temperate weather and a flat road, it is not unusual to see measurable improvements in our running week by week.

My friend Fred, whom I have written about before in this blog, is 81 years old and still has that attitude.  Like us, he has not run a race all year due to Covid restrictions.  But like me he has been invited to participate in a number of "virtual races," and he just completed a virtual 10-K on a track on Thanksgiving Day that consisted of 25 laps around a track.  All by himself.  "Never again!" he told me when I asked him about it afterward.  I feel that same way, and yet we both miss the motivation of training for a real race, with real competition around us, jostling our elbows at the starting line.  "What have you got coming up?" we used to ask a runner we had not seen in awhile.  The answer is nothing, these days.

Last year, we ran a race nearly every month.  A couple of weeks after returning from Britain and Ireland in September, Martha ran the Senior Games in Cary.  We followed that up with races in October, November, and December, then came out here to Atlantic Beach and ran a race in January, February, and March.  That March race was the Crystal Coast 10-K and Half Marathon, on March 7, the last race either of us has run.

Two days later we left for Highlands.  We had planned to run races in every month this year, but before long the dire effects of the Covid-19 pandemic became clear, races were cancelled (including the Boston Marathon for the first time in its history), and all of the rest of our "New Normal" began to sink in.

Fred told me that he thought a lot of runners would give up running entirely without having the motivation of races in their lives.  It's true:  there is a world of difference between simply going out for a run, and going on a training run, watching speeds improve and distance grow farther.  Still, we continue to run as if we are training - why else would a man run four "Picnic Area Intervals" today while a small group of Park Rangers looked on wonderingly, shaking their heads, at this old guy pumping his arms furiously, gritting his teeth, trying to get that last one just one second faster than the last?

I am training for something in the meantime - in this "mean time" - for that glorious day when we can run a race again, safely.  For that day when this nightmare of a pandemic will be over and we can return to what we were doing nine months ago. For a new day to dawn.