Week two of the comeback. I did my first race, coming 15th at the county champs, which is better than I thought I would do. BRAT won team gold for the first time ever.
I like running.
Monday: 16km easy (16)
Tuesday: AM 12km hard (towpath) + 15 minute jog / PM 8km easy (23)
Wednesday: Cannon Hill Parkrun. Moderate effort, sore from yesterday. (16)
Thursday: AM 8km on treadmill / PM 16km easy (24)
Friday: rest (0)
Saturday: AM 7km easy / PM Warwickshire XC Champs – 15th.
Team gold. First race since August (22)
You might not find the word in the Oxford English Dictionary, nor would a Wikipedia search prove fruitful. So here is the definition, courtesy of Tim who coined the phrase:
“an athlete whose power of 10 profile contains results for so many events that the site puts a scroll bar in so you can see all their PBs.”
This is the kind of thing some of us runners talk about – exciting hey? Basically, according to Tim you’re a scroller if you race over a wide range of distances. Personally I don’t see anything wrong with this; on the other hand Tim thinks it is a disaster and was very upset when the site decided to rank parkruns separately from 5ks thus pushing him over the 9 event threshold and into scrollerhood (scrollerdom? scrollership? scrollery?).
With 14 different distances on my page, I am definitely one. Four of those have been added this summer which distorts things a bit. The new distances I’ve tried this summer have been 800, 1200, 1500 and the mile. Two of these are fairly standard events whereas 1200 and the mile are more novelty events that I may or may not end up doing again. It has been fun though, and I’ve enjoyed the challenge of racing over new distances. One thing I have found useful is the ability to really push myself over a short distance which has translated into better times for 3000 and 5000 which are my main events on the track. Some of those races have been training runs and some have been part of a double or even triple in the same day.
I’m enjoying mixing up my training and experimenting with new things. One is racing a lot over a range of distances (being a scroller), one is training with a group on a Tuesday and Saturday under Bud’s guidance and another is running more doubles now I’ve got a bit of time off work.
It’s fun and I am looking forward to what the next few months hold for me running-wise.
May started with a surprise PB over 10k. Two weekends later I ran 3 races on the same day; a 1500, a 5000 and then a 400m relay leg. I followed that up with a PB at 5000 metres last weekend to win the county championships and then decided to try and squeeze one more race in before the month was out. In those races I had managed to amass PBs over 3 different distances and really wanted a crack at a 4th, this time over 3000 metres. The 4 in 4 in 31 days plan was also due to the fact that it’s my birthday today and I wanted to see if I could crack all my PBs before another year was added to my age.
Unfortunately my plan to leave a mark whilst the branding iron was still hot was foiled. Last night the iron was distinctly lukewarm; I hadn’t really recovered from the weekend and I knew it before the race started. It went out slow and I found myself at the front after half a lap, towing the rest of the field behind me. The group that stayed with me dwindled to 4 and we hit 1km in 2:59 and a mile in around 4:46. Just before 2k one of the young athletes in the lead group came round me and took off. This coincided with my legs giving way and I had no response to a surge that was probably no quicker than a 68 second lap. I tucked in behind the two other athletes who came past me and outkicked one of them down the home straight. I finished 3rd in 8:57.
I had tried to push my luck and as a result I finished in a time much slower than I should be capable of on current form. I might be a year older today but I’m still no wiser! Tim had a poor run too, having also run a PB at the weekend. Mark on the other hand, who didn’t have a track 5k in his legs, ran his best time for nearly 2 decades. The moral of this story? Race less, train more.
Last night I made my middle distance debut over the rarely run distance of 1200 metres.
In the past I’ve only ever raced over 3k and above, but I thought I’d try something new. I turned up and was told that there would be two pace makers, one doing 63 and one doing 68. I didn’t really know what kind of pace I would run, but guessed that it would be somewhere in between. Not wanting to make my first experience a painful one, I opted to follow the second group. In fact, everyone went off so fast that I had to work pretty hard not to get detached from the back of this group. Half a lap in and I was in last position, and stayed there until we had got round the whole of the first lap. I glanced at the clock and it was showing roughly 68 seconds. A bit slow, I thought.
I started to pick people off down the back straight between 500 and 600 and as I pulled out into lane 2 to do so, was exposed to a very strong wind, so strong that I had to start working much harder just to maintain my cadence. It felt strange to be half way through the race already, having only run 600 metres. The next person ahead of me was the 68 pacemaker who I overtook just before the bell, passed in around 2:15. Another athlete was falling off the back of the first group so I made him my new target, a welcome distraction from the pain now engulfing my calves. I passed him with 300 to go and kicked as hard as I could. The home straight seemed longer than it ever has done before, but wasn’t quite long enough for me to catch the next athlete ahead. If I was in pain, the runners I passed on the last lap must have been in even more pain. I adopted the standard post-track-race pose of hands on knees and head bowed; most of my competitors were doing the same.
My finishing time was 3:22.33, a new PB to add to my collection. This was about what I expected, but I also left knowing I could have gone out a bit harder and still been able to kick on the last lap. I could have taken a few more seconds off, for sure. But that’s part of the learning curve, and learning to push myself to the limit over a short distance was the exact purpose of last night’s race, as I prepare to try and take down my 3k and 5k times this summer.
As well as these being the windiest conditions I’ve ever raced in, it was also the most fun I’ve had in a race for a long time. It was completely novel and different, it was fast, and it was also humbling to be taught a lesson in middle distance running by a load of 17 year olds.
For the club runner in this country, spring and autumn mean one thing: the road relays. While the autumn brings the area and national 6-stage events, the spring is all about the 12-stage. My area is the midlands, and our event takes place in Sutton Park, a huge expanse of green space in the north of Birmingham which is also home of the national event 3 weeks later.
Next Saturday my clubmates and I will be taking the short journey up to Sutton to compete in the Midland 12 Stage. The event alternates between long legs and short legs, the difference being made up by a long out-and-back section where you can see just how far ahead of or behind the nearest runner you are. Our team manager Richard always puts me on a long leg so I am well acquainted with the course, which is approximately 5.4 miles or 8.7km long. It is this unconventional race distance that appeals to me so much. You have no idea what kind of time you should run for that distance other than the time you ran last year (28:14, seeing as you asked), there are no mile or km markers and the course has sharp turns and hills from start to finish.
All of which means that when you wait on the start line for your number to be called, you know you’re not there to run an even-paced time trial, you’re there to race. Unless you wear a GPS watch (I’m still old-school and don’t have one) you have no idea how far you’ve gone or how far you have left to go. All you know is that there is a guy in front of you who needs to be behind you, and that there’s a guy behind you who definitely can’t go in front of you. It doesn’t always work out that way, of course, particularly when you take over from a much faster athlete who gives you an artificially high starting position. But that’s part of the fun. You chase and chase and take on whoever tries to run beside you. It is a race, and it is sport at its purest. If you’re on leg 10 at the national it’s not quite the same story though, and it is common for athletes on this leg not to see anyone for most of their run due to the large gaps that normally form by that point. Either way, it is a true mental and physical challenge.
As I write I haven’t yet seen the email with the team list, but I suspect it will contain the rules, as stated every year by Richard:
1. Go out hard.
2. If someone catches you, hang on to them for as long as you physically can.
3. Run the tangent around every corner.
4. If you’re smiling when I see you, you’re not working hard enough.
So next Saturday afternoon I will be going out hard, hanging on, running the shortest possible line and all with a grimace on my face. Can’t wait.