Outdated Satellite Photos, A Biblical-style Plague of Gnats, Five Miles and Striders

Ran five miles at the local high school track tonight. I threw in 10 x 100m striders after two miles. The entire run took a little over 47 minutes.

My original plan was to run at the track I thought was at my daughter's elementary school. When I visited the school in June, the woman who was showing me around mentioned that they have a program where the kids can run laps at their 1/5 mile track during recess. They log their miles and then their names are put on banners once they reach certain milestone totals, such as 50, 100 or 200 miles.

Driving by the school since we moved here, I had never seen anything resembling a track, but then I figured that since the track was not a standard distance, perhaps it was really just a dirt path in one of the fields behind the school. However, when I went online tonight to look at satellite photos of the local schools to see which ones had tracks, I saw that there was one right behind my daughter's school. Since it's the one that would be closest to our house, I decided to check it out.

I wasn't even sure if the track would be open to the public. There are high chain link fences surrounding the school grounds. Behind the school there was an open gate that led to the athletic fields and I could see that there were people going back and forth from a pickup truck parked just inside the gate. It was a couple of adults and a couple of kids. They appeared to be unloading mulch or soil from the truck into a little garden next to a detached corrugated steel building behind the school.

I asked the woman if there was a track back there somewhere and if it was open to the public. Turns out there used to be a track but they removed it so that the entire field would be grass. You could still see a little bank in the field where the ground had been raised so that the track would be level. Someone was walking a dog on what used to be the track. I asked her about other tracks in the area and she suggested one in the next town and she wasn't too sure about the high school or middle school tracks, about which she was a bit embarrassed. "I really should know more about my own town," she said.

I thought about running on the former track there, but I wanted to do my striders on an actual track. Then, the woman and I were attacked by swarms of gnats, the likes of which I have never seen before. They seemed perfectly intent on and content with kamikaze-ing into my mouth ears and nose. I decided to go to the high school. It was right in the middle of the city, where I hoped there would be fewer bugs dying to be ingested or inhaled by me.

Found the track, noticed a sign on the fence saying that walkers and joggers should use the outer lanes. In my old town I ignored these signs because everyone did and no one had ever said anything to me about using lane one. For some reason, though, I was worried that someone would accost me for doing so here. I have this irrational fear that there are all sorts of rules and customs which are strictly observed here and which I know nothing about and that I am always about to run afoul of them. This is how I am. I'm still like a grade school kid, worrying about "getting in trouble."

There was an older man putting a high school girl and boy through some drills that looked a lot like plyometrics for runners. If anyone is going to have a problem with me running in lane one, I thought, it will be this guy. I figured I would run in lane one anyway, until someone told me not to; then I would make some smartass comment in retaliation before dutifully moving to the outer lanes.

No one noticed, or if they did, they didn't say anything. I did my entire run in lane one (which my Garmin Forerunner 101 told me was 5.00 miles, validating its accuracy for me, which I sometimes doubt, especially if it seems I've run faster than I expected).

Going into my striders, I still get that feeling that there's still enough left in the tank to run some decent times before I'm too old. However, I looked down after the first strider and saw that it had taken me 23 seconds to run 100m. Slower than six-minute pace. Still, I tell myself that I don't feel any different than I did in high school and that if I still weighed 140lbs (about 35lbs less than I do now), I'd probably be doing these in seventeen or eighteen seconds.

I have to keep reminding myself that I just started running a few weeks ago after a couple of months of practically nothing. It will get better.

Yesterdayoff.

Didn't run yesterday, which was planned. I've only been running 17-18 miles per week, so I want to return to training slowly and make this an easy week. Even with three miles a day four times this week and a long run of six or seven miles again next Sunday, I'll be at that amount again, but I figure knocking a half mile or so from each day's run will be adequate to ensure that I'm ready to go six or seven next Sunday.

One thing I've never really done in the past is allow myself easy weeks. I was so frustrated with the amount of mileage I could handle -- usually in the low- to mid-thirties -- I never allowed myself to step down from that amount to something even lower so that I might recover and be able to subsequently increase my mileage. Instead, because I had run over fifty miles per week consistently in the ever increasingly distant past, I theorized that I should easily be able to handle 35 mile a week without a problem. What ended up happening was that I was forever running in a funk of tired legs that never really got any better. Add in the fact that I didn't take any steps to lose weight and that I would often miss three or four consecutive days of running every couple of weeks and it becomes clear why I could never progress.

I just have to accept that this is what I'm capable of at this point and that in the months to come, as I lose weight and stay consistent, my fitness will gradually improve (as it already has) and I'll reach a point where I can do some real running and racing once again.

So, I'm back at it. After running inconsistently and infrequently for months because of a stubborn foot injury I sustained while stupidly trying to break thirteen seconds for one-hundred meters, I've finally put together a couple of weeks of daily running. My weight is probably over 175 and my long run today was only six miles, but it's a huge improvement over a few weeks ago when I couldn't even run thirty minutes straight. I'm going to be starting grad school in a little less than a month, so I don't know how consistent I'll be able to be once that starts, but I'm going to try to keep going as close to every day as I can.

My goal, at this point, is to be able to run under seventeen minutes for 5k by this time next year. That's been a goal of mine for years but, frankly, I've lacked the discipline to train consistently enough and avoid overeating and overdrinking to get anywhere near it. The last time I ran under seventeen minutes was in 1999, I think. The next closest I came was running 17:57 in 2002. In 2004 (I think), I ran 18:42. Last year I ran 19:08.

I would agree that it appears that I've been heading in the wrong direction and I know this is going to sound like an excuse, but I just haven't been trying very hard. That's actually the story of my life when it comes to both running and writing. But I'm 33 now and I realize I don't have years and years to do things I've been telling myself for years and years that I have years and years to do. As far as running is concerned, I am rapidly running out of time to get back to where I once was.

I am tempted to delete all this so that I don't have to eat my own words a year from now when I run some 5k in twenty minutes, but since no one is reading this anyway, what the hell.

A good day all around.

Ran four miles untimed this morning, just taking it easy and focusing on keeping the pace comfortable and running with good mechanics.

This evening I got a call from Portland State University letting me know that I've been accepted to their MFA program. Pretty friggin' cool.

3/3/10 - Five miles including striders

Today's run was four miles in 34:52 (last half-mile in 3:19) followed by 6 x 15 second striders and a half-mile cooldown.

Total: five miles.

Same thing in less time.

Perhaps foolishly, I've been running the same five mile, out and back course pretty much every day. I'm well aware of variety's status as the spice of life and of numerous coaches' admonitions to vary one's training both in order to avoid psychological burnout and to ensure that the body is regularly challenged with new stimuli, lest it adapt sucessfully to one repeated stress and then cease to improve.

Nonetheless, there was something other than a lack of imagination or comfort found in routine guiding my decision to plod along the same streets virtually every day of the week except Sunday, when I do my longest run on a course that, while it differs from my daily circuit, is also unchanging from week to week at this point.

Since I am in a base-building phase where my primary objective is to increase my mileage and in which each day's run would be a vanilla distance run of moderate pace and distance, my thought was that by running the same route every day and timing myself each time (without making any conscious effort to improve upon any previous time and trying to adhere strictly to the principle of running by feel - as much as I can, anyway, while being hyper-conscious of the duration of each day's run and what it might say about how quickly my fitness is improving and the tempatation that comes with that awareness to manipulate the results to suit my expectations of how quickly I feel I should be improving), I would be able to see over a series of days and weeks whether or not I was improving at all and, if so or if not, change the volume of my training accordingly.

A more typical (and perhaps more reasonable) approach would be to run a particular route once each week at a similar effort level and use that as my gauge and avoid the disappointments and false hopes that arise from the inexplicable fluctuations that bedevil any runner from one day to the next.

Unfortunately, I got sick and have missed a day here and there. An astute reader might ask if that fact might indicate a too quick increase in mileage, with which I'd be inclined to agree, having increased my mileage after two weeks in the mid to upper twenties to a week of 38 miles.

So, without deviating from my little experiment too much, I will simply shorten my five-miler to four miles over the same route on alternating days. That way I'll still have mile splits to compare. As it was, I didn't seem to be improving much and we'll see if the slight decrease in mileage helps remedy that situation.

For anyone that cares, I'll try to post weekly mileage totals from now and perhaps more detail from day to day and avoid these long-winded posts that could take up much less of the reader's time, and my own.

I think that dovetails nicely with my goal and that of runners everywhere: do the same thing in less time.

Re-creation

So my initial idea for the first (new) post on this blog was two-faceted 1) to state its purpose: to track my progress toward achieving my goal of dragging my old, fat butt under seventeen minutes for 5k - which, no problem there as I just did it - and 2) to provide some history on my running with emphasis on my post-collegiate efforts. I was going to cull some of this info from my old Geocities site which, until fairly recently, was still up. Given that I had created the site back in 2001 or 2002, it seemed as permanent as anything in a place as transient and ephemeral as the internet. To my chagrin, when I tried going to the site today in preparation for writing this blog post I learned that Geocities is no more. To modify Monty Python's dead parrot skit, it is an ex-website.

This, it goes without saying (although I'm going to anyway), is not the end of the world and doesn't even significantly affect this post other than to have prompted me to provide a lot of explanation for something that no one is going to really care about anyway, namely: the last time I actually broke 17:00 for 5k. If memory serves (and I'm learning more and more as I get older what an decreasingly compliant servant it is), it was May of either 1999 or 2000.

There, all of that for all of that.

It's not like I haven't been running, I just haven't been doing it very fast or with the sort of discipline required for improvement, or even to stave off decline.

Other quasi-significant milestones in my decline:

Last time I broke 18:00: April 25, 2004 - 17:57

Last time I broke 19:00: September, 2007 - 18:43

Last time I broke 20:00: May 31, 2009 - 19:08

I'd like to do this sometime this year, probably this fall. Battery on the laptop dangerously close to running out, so I bid you adieu, anonymous and probably nonexistent reader.