farfromfearless
Two Steps Forward…
Sunnier today, but still something of a wind - I checked on the BBC website and it said it was 18mph - but I felt pretty good about my chances.
However, my morning was unusual. I woke around 7am to help get the children ready for school. I ate my breakfast, and my wife left with the kids about 8am. Half an hour later I was feeling tired and grumpy and decided to go back to bed for a bit, eventually waking around 10.30am.
By eleven, I was hungry, and figured that instead of a snack I’d finish off last night’s pasta dinner. If I ran at 1pm, that would give me two hours to digest it. About midday I had a Coke.
And as I set off an hour later, it suddenly dawned on me that I hadn’t had any water.
Oops.
My run opened straight into the headwind that has become so familiar that it just feels like part of my run. Familiarity breeds contempt, and I wasn’t going to let the bastard beat me today. I knew I had it in me to run a sub 8-minute mile, even against an 18-20mph wind. And I did: 7:51.
With hindsight, that effort was a big mistake. Just after the mile I felt totally fried. My legs were toast. My feet felt oddly numb.
I reached the turnaround and picked it up again, but I just didn’t have any oomph. 8:13 and 8:21 miles followed.
When I reached the second turnaround (that takes me back home), I was toast. The wind, of course, knew, and did everything it could to make me crawl and beg. I dropped down to the horrendous 9-minute/mile area.
Around this time, I started having a conversation with myself. Internally, mind - I’m not that mad. Basically my brain and my body got into a debate. It went a bit like this:
Body: “Nine minutes a mile? That’s it. I’m done. Screw this.”
Brain: “Now, come on. You only have half a mile or so to go. Hang in there!”
Body: “That’s easy for you to say. Look at you, sitting up their in all your glory. You’re basically just along for the ride. I’m doing all the work here.”
Brain: “I’m doing some of the work, sunshine. Don’t you forget it.”
Body: “Yeah, great, you’re shutting down my reproductive system. Way to go. That helped a lot.”
Brain: “Do you know there are people in the world, right now, who can run twice as fast as you can? And I don’t mean at this awful speed. I mean, your best mile is, what, 7:35? The world record for the mile is 3:43.”
Body: “Not helping, not helping…”
Brain: “And get this - when Mark Allen won the Hawaii Ironman in 1989, he averaged almost 6-minutes per mile for the entire marathon! And that was after he’d swum 2.4 miles and rode 112 miles on a bike. Under the Hawaiian sun!”
Body: “What are you trying to do to me?”
Brain: “I’m just wondering… could you possibly go any faster?”
Body: “Will you SHUT UP.”
Pause.
Brain: “I think we should see other people.”
I crashed and burned to an 8:47 in the last 0.64 of a mile, which dragged my overall average to 8:15, which is the slowest I’ve been in basically a week. Things have gone well lately so I’m not going to be too defeatist about one day, but man it was tough. Really tough. One of the few upsides was that I finished the full half-hour.
Splits/chart:
I have to ask ‘why?’ Was it:
- Poor hydration
- The pasta hadn’t digested properly, and was hurting more than helping
- It was less than 24 hours since I last ran
- I’m feeling the first effects of over-training
- My shoes are wearing out, and that’s why my feet were numb
What I need to be careful about with all this is that I don’t get too focused on speed. I’m never going to be a competitive 5K runner, certainly not to a standard that my gigantic ego would tolerate. All week I’ve been thinking about when I’m going to break a seven-minute mile, and could I maybe go under six this year, and would I ever be capable of running five? That’s all well and good and it’s nice to have goals and some of these things may happen, but right now I just need to log miles. I love my Garmin and I’ll continue to monitor my speed, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of distance and overall time.
I’m concerned about my shoes, though. I’ve had my Garmin for nine days, and in that time have logged 29.95 miles. If one assumes an average of about three miles per day since I started this, that’s 117 miles. And I’ve worn those trainers pretty much daily - including many hour-long power-walking sessions on the treadmill at the gym - for about six months beforehand. I wear them during the day when I’m not running, too. Are they finally done? From what I can find, most experts seem to think you should ditch your shoes between 350 to 500 miles, so I’ve got months to go, but I’m not so sure my Nikes are holding up. Other sites seem to say every three months if you run every day.
Anyone have any personal (as opposed to generic) advice on this? I wonder if I need a pair just for running. I think it might be time.
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