Flashes of Panic

That’s how much faster I was today than in December.

I’d say something rueful about never having worked harder for less improvement, but I’m sure there were times in college when I was hammering out the miles week after week and getting slower. And the fact is, my training over those three weeks has been pretty undirected.

But I went in with a much higher degree of planning and consideration today. A ran with me down to the Harvard track (about three miles from us) and gave me a strategy distilled from the strategic mistakes she’d seen runners make at yesterday’s meet. (Essentially, the time to bear down is the closing laps of the second K and the start of the third, because that’s when most people seem to lose the plot.) I’d looked at the heat sheets and knew I’d be running at the back, so I planned to avoid getting out too quickly and set up targets for the second part of the race. Then, with A on the first corner to take splits and yell them to me, I switched off the little accountant in my head that wants to beep a watch and try to run a specific pace, and gave myself permission to relax and just race.

And I did that. I fell to the back, tucked in behind a guy who looked like a wily veteran (he turned out to be 50) and ran a series of really good splits for the first half of the race. I only understood about half of what I heard A yelling to me, but I did hear her say that I’d passed the mile (more or less) in 5:24, which was just about exactly the pace I’d wanted to run, averaging 40.5 per 200m lap. (The laps at Harvard aren’t 200m, of course, more like 201.1, but let’s leave that alone for now.)

Right around then, though, the two of us caught a pair of straggling younger guys (I assumed they were college kids, but looking at the results I think one was actually a prep) and my pacer took his sweet time moving around them. I didn’t want to move past and give up on his near-perfect pacing, so I waited. When he did pass them, he took off hard, and even though I followed him right around, he gapped me then and I found myself adrift. Right about then was when things started to hurt and I started feeling sorry for myself. There wasn’t a whole lot of race left, but I ran a pair of 43-second laps (5:44 pace) before finally delivering a 39 for the last one.

Final time, 10:14.90. In other words, I ran the same time, but smarter. (“You’re getting good at that pace,” commented a training partner who also ran both races.) I wasn’t last (I actually lapped someone), and I hit my seed right on.

On the one hand, I wish I could have done a bit better. But I didn’t have a lot of reason to expect a better time; I’d run pretty close to the edge last time, and I hadn’t done workouts that had made me feel like I was in measurably better shape. And all in all, I’ve had fun with this season. I haven’t run this many short races in ages, and I think I enjoyed them more now than I ever did in college. And if I can do the work to bring the speed up to longer distances, I could run some pretty good races in the spring and summer.

Now Playing: Jump In The River from I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got by Sinéad O’Connor

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