Filed under: Speedwork, Training Runs | Tags: beginners, fight, good advice, gym class, memories, moving, running, Speedwork, struggle, Team
Ok, so the title of this post is a little facetious. I’m not in any actual pain. I simply want to emphasize that speedwork? &$@!!%&&@!!! HARD! I arrived at the arranged place, and met a couple of people from the Team, along with a few others I hadn’t met before. One of them was eighty-six years old. He’d been running since he was sixty, he said, and had completed seven half marathons. His PR (personal record, in runningspeak) schools mine. We warmed up by running an easy quarter mile loop. Then we got to business.
Today we ran two 400s (meters, that is), one 800, and finished up with another 400. This adds up to about a mile and a quarter. There is a three to five minute break between each dash. The point is not to run as fast as you absolutely can, but to run at about eighty to ninety percent. The goal, eventually, would be to run the equivalent of a six-minute mile. Or less.
Let us keep in mind that throughout elementary, junior high, and high school, I was one of those people we call “Lasties,” in the infamous Gym Class Mile.
The guy with the stopwatch, who I will refer to as Stopwatch Guy for the purposes of anonymity and, well, my utter lack of ability to remember names, counted to three and, as they say, we were off! My first sprint was not bad at all: 90 seconds. It all went downhill from there. Second 400 was 123, and the 800 – oh, the 800! Was 348 seconds. And it schooled me. Readers, if you need a way to forget everything going on in your life, speedwork is the way to go. Three quarters of the way down that 800 stretch and I was grunting – no, moaning – to be done. The humid air seared my lungs, my arms whirled at my sides, and I’m pretty sure that my facial expression could have matched the contorted grimaces of some unfortunate soul subjected to a Medieval thumbscrew. All I could do was think about what Stopwatch Guy said:
“The point of the 800 is to fight! Too many people give up before the end of a race. Keep your head down, keep your arms pumping, keep your knees up, and fight, fight, fight!”
So I fought. And for those three hundred and forty-eight seconds, I didn’t think about my broken heart, I didn’t think about my loneliness, I didn’t think about the future, and how wide open and scary it was. Only the present mattered, and the present was the struggle of the physical body against itself, the struggle to get simply, beautifully, from one point to another. To fight.
After the last 400, we did a warm-down mile around the park, then sat around in the dusk, stretching and talking. These were some nice folks, and it made me almost sorry that I’m leaving this town in two weeks.
Tomorrow we’re back to normal: four miles with the Team. After this workout, it’ll either be ridiculously easy or completely brutal. I’ll let you know.
