Flashes of Panic

I raced my first indoor track mile in… I don’t know, a dozen years or so, yesterday.

I think the last time I raced an indoor mile was my senior year in college. Since then I’ve learned more than a little about being self-aware during my races, which translates to running smarter races—a good thing, because I don’t have the raw speed I used to. And the track work I have been doing has made me more confident about the speed I do have.

I figured I could run on the close order of 5:20, so that’s what I seeded at. The heats broke at 4:40, 4:50, 5:15, and 5:20, so I got in the fourth heat: eleven of us, I think, who all figured we would run between 5:15 and 5:20. Looking at the results, it looks like seven of us were right, which seems like an unusually high percentage. The good news was that I wouldn’t be running the race on my own, in a gap between people running too fast for me and people who couldn’t keep up. (That would probably have happened in the 3,000, so I picked the right race.)

I opted to go sockless in my spikes again, because I’d blistered when I’d run in them with socks so far, but they’re still gritty inside from cross-country. (This despite me washing them once.) No problems in the end, though.

We actually had a girl (young woman? Very young) leading for the first few laps, and I was hitting decent splits though I had a lot of people in front of me. I knew I had to save a bit, and I knew some of them would come back. After three or four laps I started to feel the pace, and I shifted my focus away from a steady pace and let myself float the corners if I hammered the straights. This helped a lot, because the little rests put me in a good position to eat up the small gap the lead pack had built. They were fading, too; even though my fifth and sixth laps were the slowest of the race, I was back in the thick of it by then, and passing people.

And I knew I could run two laps pretty hard. Everyone seemed to be coming back to me now, and the feeling of passing people buoyed me up. On the last lap, I found myself up at a speed I didn’t know I had; Dan said he clocked me at 35 for the last lap. He also said if I’d found that speed a little earlier (or hadn’t been so slow on the sixth lap) I would’ve been challenging for the heat win. I wasn’t even aware there were only two left in front of me; I just saw the time on my watch (5:15 low; 5:15.65 was the official time) and knew I’d run well.

Now I want to try again. The oddly encouraging thing is this: my PR is 4:48, from college, when I weighed at least ten pounds less than I do now. (It was disappointing at the time, because I ran 4:49, probably for 1,600m, as a sophomore in high school.) Figure the two-seconds-per-pound-per-mile thing, and yesterday’s time suddenly looks pretty decent. (Aside from the obvious question of why I’m carrying those extra ten pounds.) I’m pretty sure I could get under 5:10, given the chance; could I run under 5:00 again? That would really be remarkable.

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