Training

As I said in my last post, I did not run the Twilight 5-K last Saturday.  We walked to the Kelsey-Hutchinson Park with chairs and cooler and set up near the finish line, watching runners start and finish, and enjoying white wine and charcuterie.  (At least there was not a downpour as there was last year.)  This race is always hot a humid (when it is not raining) and I have run it five times, my fastest in 28:27 in 2014.  Seeing runners and walkers that I knew finish the race inspired me to think that I might be capable of racing it again, and other races as well, despite falling into such abysmal condition.  I do enjoy racing, after all, and I have not discounted the possibility of preparing for a 5-K this fall.

So I have begun officially “training,” by beginning to run weekly 400-meter intervals.  It is a familiar place to run (now just a quarter-mile from our home) - from Harris Drive to just short of Laurelwood Lane - and as I run them I remember all of the workouts I have run on this same road, from 400-meter intervals to tempo runs to mile repeats to long runs of 20 miles.  I like to tell folks, “The older I get, the faster I was,” but as a fellow veteran runner pointed out to me after a race a few years ago when I ruefully said that to him: “Yes, but you are the runner you are today, and you should be thankful for it.”  Examining my race times over the years, although not without the occasional plateau, shows a steady decline in race times.  And that is as it should be.  (I just don’t want to come in dead last in a race.)

The interval went well – only five seconds slower than my last interval on this same course last November.  So that is encouraging.  I repeated the interval training this week, without any ill effects other than the strained feeling in my lungs afterward from breathing in the humid air filled with mid-August’s medium high pollen.  It is perhaps the least ideal time to run in Highlands, but I will never forget that this running paradise is cooler than anywhere else in the Southeast. 

An additional benefit:  two weeks ago, a beautiful doe ran across the road in front of me just past the Chastain house.  Pat was in the front yard, and I said, “Look!  Pat!”  But she shrugged and said, “Oh yes, she comes here all the time.  Larry feeds her.”  I walked by slowly and she eyed me carefully but did not move from the side of the road.  I do not carry my phone with me, but Martha walks this route and took this picture of what I think is the same deer later in the week.  And mid-way through my 400-meter interval this Monday, the same deer crossed the road and watched me curiously from the driveway across the street.  “Why is this man running?” she seemed to be asking.

A question I sometimes ask myself.  

When I returned home, I checked the race calendar, and found that one of my favorite races, the Autumn Breeze 5-K in Tallulah Falls, will again be taking place at its usual time on a Sunday afternoon on September 27.  That will give me six weeks for training.

Turning Another Page

I was surprised to see that my last post was so long ago – June 20 - and included a photo of a dozen or more boxes of books next to the piano still to be sorted or given away.  Tempus fugit!  Now, by the middle of August, all of those books have been sorted, and other than the occasional picture to be hung (like the lovely Oriental print we found in a thrift store in Brevard last week), we can now say that we have completely moved in.  In place of those boxes of books, most of which were donated to the Bookworm, I have hung all my marathon photos, which in our old house were hidden away behind the fireplace – “The Wall of Dubious Behavior,” I used to call it.  

It has been a long time since my last marathon, and I have not even run a 5-K race this year, but it is inspiring to remember the runner I used to be.  Moving occupied so much time and energy that my running dropped off to as little as one mile per week.  Then, during the middle of last month, I contracted a respiratory virus that hit so hard that it reminded me of having Covid in France in 2022.  And then I gave it to Martha, which made me feel even worse.  Now we are both recovering, although I feel as if I am climbing up out of a hole.   

But I have been here before, and my fitness and energy is slowly returning.  I continue to turn another page in my running log each week and see what I can do.  Yesterday I completed four miles (with plenty of walking breaks), during which I suddenly found the urge to include a single 400-meter “burst” of relative speed, just a few seconds slower than my last attempt at 400 meters in November.  (Has it been that long?)  Still, it is amazing how much only a few seconds, or an additional mile, can inspire and motivate the aging, out-of-shape, recovering runner.

I will not be running the Twilight 5-K this Saturday, but I will be watching from the corner of the road – the course goes right past our home, now – and cheering on other runners, just as I have been cheered on in the past.  I will be an onlooker, a spectator.  I will call out, “Looking Good!”  Words that have often lifted my spirits at the finish line in the past.  And I will turn another page in my running log.