Bath House Intervals

In contrast to Sunday’s 62-degree shorts-and-T-shirt run, Monday morning dawned windy and cloudy and twenty degrees colder.  But these conditions seemed better than those forecast for Tuesday, so I decided to complete a three-mile run, to the “Bath House” and then back on the beach.  What a glorious place to run, this wide flat beach!  It was exactly low tide, and the north wind was blowing offshore, softening the crash of surf, the great wide flashing ocean on my left elbow just a few feet away.  There was almost nobody else out there, but I did pass one well-bundled woman gathering shells, and I noticed as I approached that she was wearing a face-mask!  Really?  I steered a wide berth around this overly-cautious woman.

It’s not all about the running, I told Martha recently, but it’s a big part of the reason we come out here in January, to be able not only to maintain our fitness as runners but also to improve it by adding distance and speed that would be difficult to accomplish in Highlands.  We have been able to run three or even four days a week, and on the alternate days I have developed a challenging weight program using only two 25-pounds dumbbells.  Martha completes an equally challenging fitness routine in front of the DVD player that she has been doing for several years now, skipping it only on long-run days.

Today I repeated Monday’s run, except that I included two “Bath House Intervals,” my first intervals in several months.  Interval training is a classic way to increase speed when preparing for a race, and this is an especially good place to run them, a long flat paved stretch in the big parking lot there where there is little traffic instead of out on the bicycle path.  I run them from the “Yield” sign at one end to the trash can at the other, somewhere between an eighth and a quarter of a mile.  (Since I run them in the same location every year, the exact distance is not important.)  I clocked a 1:09 on the first one and a 1:08 on the second, and was pretty pleased with myself, remembering that last year I got closer and closer to 1:00, and by the end of our stay here had dropped a second or two below that.  It is satisfying to feel that fatigue in the legs, and I definitely felt it when returning on the beach.  

I always wear my Garmin Forerunner watch when running, which has caused me to be chided by some of my non-watch-wearing running friends.  Rather than constraining me, it gives me a feeling of freedom as I simply hit Start and then let it tell me how far I have run.  Like many runners, I am a little obsessed with statistics, and I have recorded my mileage for every run, every week, and every year since 1995.  My cumulative total on New Year’s Day was 31,973 miles, farther than the circumference of the earth!  Like the fatigue in the legs after a hard workout that number is satisfying to think about. 

My other watch, the one I wear daily, is a vintage Timex Ironman Triathlon, which preceded the Garmin.  It did not tell me how far I ran, but it’s easy-to-use stopwatch function told me how fast I ran.  These days I still use it when I am boiling pasta noodles or baking something in the oven, even though our oven at home and here both have built-in timers.  It also tells me what time of day it is, an increasingly irrelevant thing to know as we settle into the easy routine of our Sabbatical.  As if in confirmation of that irrelevance I put it on today and found that its face was blank, its battery depleted.

My Garmin stays plugged in 24/7 waiting for the next run, and it seems almost like an insult to use it for the commonplace function of telling me what time of day it is.  So I have been going about watch-less when I am not running, glancing from time to time at my naked wrist, which tells me it is a hair past a freckle.  And, oh yes, the clouds in the western sky are beginning to turn orange and red and purple, and so I know exactly what time it is again, as the sun sets on another good day.