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.