A little speed work goes a long way

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This second post was going to be about my training plan – but runners run and I decided to make the second post about something more mundane and also more fun: “my run today.”

I preface this by explaining that I am a distance person. Some runners can step onto a track and pound out evenly paced, perfect intervals whilst grinning, skylarking and probably showboating. I am not one of them; indeed, I am in awe of them. I don’t have the fast-twitch muscle fibers, lactic threshold, metabolism, patience or, shall we say, intense personality for speed work.

But I have the gift that, for me, a little speed work goes a very long way and I have accepted that interval days are necessary. Today was such a day, my first serious one in about eight weeks. After work, I went up into the woods for two loops of 4.2 miles each, with a one-mile effort in the first loop and half-mile efforts and jogging quarter-mile recoveries in the second, and a one-mile jog at the end. I did not want to do it: two days of rain, thirty nine degrees at the start and falling and black night in ninety minutes is not how I’d prefer to start a ten miler. But I now have a running blog, with it some accountability and I made the effort.

The lower trail was ankle deep in puddles in places; the stream beside the second trail up to the fire road was, in places, over both its banks and the trail and the rocks were slick with puddles hidden beneath leaves. The road back to the start of the loop was a thin, splattering kind of mud on gravel. It had the potential to be a grim slog.

The effort was so much with the elements – with the puddles and rocks at the bottom, with the wind roaring in the naked trees, with the falling darkness, with the twigs and great tumbling masses of leaves covering everything – that the effort with the running lessened by comparison. As the line in the old Ian Tyson goes, “The battles with the mountains and cattle seem to bring out the best in a man.” There were no cattle but there were mountains and there was plenty of roughness in the wind, rain, cold and streams over the trails.

The first – I sometimes call it the “wake up” – interval was a little shaky and by the time I splashed around for the second loop I was a little cold. I started it with serious doubts about my physical capacity, sense and sanity – but it was solid. By ‘solid,’ I mean ‘they were ragged but I kept myself together.’ I wasn’t sure of my own capacity setting out – or for that matter, during the workout – but as the efforts progressed, my confidence in myself increased rather than decreased. I say that not in boast but in prostrate humility.

The workout did what it was supposed to: first and foremost, it kept me from freezing into an icicle for ten miles while I got in some aerobic and anaerobic self-improvement. Beyond that, it gave me a clear idea of what I need to work on: longer intervals paying attention to form on the beach and shorter intervals paying attention to speed on the trails. And it got me good and muddy which – I having not really ever outgrown my childhood love of jumping in puddles – is always an innocent guilty pleasure.

Nine and a half miles on the day. It feels sweet, now: rain beating out a tattoo on the roof, wind roaring in the leafless night outside – and I can put my feet up on the couch having earned it, that is until tomorrow morning’s run.

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