Flashes of Panic

I wanted to get a second hard run in this week, so I left the house just after 9:30 to run down to Fresh Pond. I cut my warm-up pretty close; I just had time to sign the waiver before race instructions started.

Whereupon I discovered that not only was there a mob of runners there—more than one high-school cross-country program, I think—but due to construction on the golf-course side of the pond, the short race was now 1.9 miles (or so) and the long race four miles, not five. (I won’t detail the course changes involved… let’s just say there were two U-turns.)

There was plenty of traffic at the start; lots of kids jockeying for position and not paying very close attention to whether they had room to cut in. (Not unlike Boston traffic, I might add.) I settled in twenty or thirty meters back from a big snowball of kids I figured would be stopping after the short race, and started picking off the stragglers. Experience will help these kids; they’ve got energy and enthusiasm, but they don’t have the kind of efficiency that comes from lots of miles (they over-stride with slow turnover) or the craftiness that comes from lots of races (don’t ever look back. Nothing behind you matters, until it’s in front of you; then it matters.)

One of them actually kept going past the short race finish, suggesting he’d go all the way; I was impressed. I ran with another guy, about my age, who said he was training for a 50-miler and was inserting the race in the middle of a long run. I was impressed; I didn’t expect to be able to do more than run home post-race. I pointed out the kid in front of us and noted that he was probably feeling sorry for himself now, but that he’d bolt like a scared rabbit if we pulled up on his shoulder in the last half-mile.

My companion decided that it would therefore be a good idea to put the kid away early, and pulled away from me. As he ran with the kid, they passed one unleashed dog which first challenged him, then bit him. He stopped to berate the owner, but I still didn’t have time to catch them.

He dropped the kid, and I started coming up on him in the last half-mile. As we came down the hill to the finish, I said, “Let’s see some of that finishing speed!” He looked puzzled for a second, but picked up a bit when he saw I was bearing down on him. I knew he could out-kick me, but I wanted to make him work for it. I got up on my toes and tried to pull even, but he held me off and we finished a second apart, then congratulated each other.

I got the #5 popsicle stick, which suggests that I’ll be in tomorrow’s Globe. I ran 25:24 by my watch, 6:21 pace if the course is actually the four miles they say it is. This is a big improvement on my last Fresh Pond result and my per-mile pace from the Peach Festival, but still over three minutes behind my four-mile PR from 2002.

Now Playing: King’s Crossing from From A Basement On The Hill by Elliott Smith