Flashes of Panic

I ran a lot last week. Partly because I didn’t take a zero day during the “week” defined by my current log (an IAAF pocket appointment book, running Mondays to Sundays,) and partly because I had two or three monster days, I ran 6:19 last week (that’s six hours, nineteen minutes, for those who track miles, like I used to.) I figure that’s on the close order of 45 miles, a high for me since 2003.

In some ways, I still have a long way to go. I start out slow and I take a while to get warmed up. When I have a hard day, it takes me a day or two longer to recover than it used to. And the endurance to hold a strong pace through a longer race is still not there.

However, I’ve been going with A to run with a new training group up in Wakefield on Tuesday nights. The coach has quite a resume (several ARs and a few Olympians in his day—I could name some of his athletes, and you’d know them. Yes, you.) I’m not, and never was, of the caliber of athlete he wants to recruit for this group, but A is, and I go essentially to be her personal workout rabbit, like Hicham el Guerrouj is supposed to have had.

He’s a character in a lot of ways, with his sentences piling out so quickly he can’t finish one before he wants to start another. He’s talking as though he’s training us in secret, with his special formula, but everything he’s given us so far has felt like nothing more than plain commonsense training to me. And it’s helping; I do feel like I can pick up the pace now, and run for a little while at a quicker pace than I would if I was just looping around by myself. Despite his semi-lunacy, he has one very important part of coaching down: he gives me confidence in what I’m doing, and lets me see week to week improvement.

So even though I won’t be in shape for any 2002-quality races any time soon, I am planning one or two hard efforts for the fall. And I’m approaching some kind of mental confidence I haven’t had, what I think of as “Gallipoli fitness,” after the scene from that movie:

“What are your legs?”
“Steel springs!”
“What are they going to do?”
“Hurl me down the track!”

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