Something very odd has happened. A run.
It’s been 5 months since the Boston Marathon, since when I’ve plodded a total of 9 miles. Two miles a month isn’t ideal preparation for the coming campaign. Including the 5 minute walk to warm down, the 3.64 miles this evening took me 48 minutes. That’s not very good.
The positive spin is that it’s not quite as bad as it might have been. After 22 weeks out of action, I was fearing being forced into some pitiful, alternating 2 minutes run – 2 minutes walk routine. There were three brief walk breaks, but a total of about 40 plodding minutes. I can’t bring myself to call it “running” but even mild jogging felt like a triumph after the lay-off.
I mentioned “the coming campaign” earlier, though I’m struggling to define just what this campaign is. The original impetus was to aim for a spring marathon, but this may not be wise. Instead, without realising it, I seem to have talked myself into aiming for a sub-2 hour half marathon. It’s a sort of accidental target.
At the moment, the thought of running sub-2 is absurd. The more I mention it, the harder I will fall, and the more it will hurt. And yet… and yet I like the idea of having a time goal rather than a race goal. I’ve become slightly disillusioned with an objective that is simply to complete a particular race. Taking part in Boston may have been a dream realised, but hitting the wall at about 17 miles, and lapsing into a painful run-walk slog for nearly 10 miles sucked some of the satisfaction from it. Let’s face it, just getting round a race route isn’t much of an aspiration. But a time target is.
I’ve always regarded 10 minute miles as my natural pace once moderately fit, and this seems to be reflected in my PBs for half marathon and shorter distances. A sub-2 half would mean dropping down to 9:09 a mile. Or let’s make that 9 minutes a mile — it’s not a good idea to aim to finish a race in 1:59:59. It’s not hard to run a 9 minute mile, or an 8 minute mile. When I look at my race splits, I’m always surprised at some of the speedier patches. The challenge is not to ‘run fast’, relatively speaking. The challenge is to run fast and keep running fast for 13 miles.
And perhaps a trickier hurdle than that is to remain free of injury. During this evening’s elephantine plod, two or three times I was aware of a remote twinge in my left calf. It never actually threatened to become a pull or a strain, but it was just reminding me that it was there. I can do plenty of things to help keep the monster at bay, and this will be top of the agenda for tomorrow morning’s chat with Phil the sports therapist.
