Off track

I hate the track.

I’ve hated the track since high school, when I ran with the girls basketball team out of the gym, up the hill to the stadium and around the black cinder track, huffing and panting while Coach Blow-Dry stood around in his sans-a-belt trousers. Loping around in circles, listening to my own labored breath and watching the rocks jump up from the ground and sign leases inside my socks ranks right up there with shampooing the insides of my eyelids. I switched to fencing in college, just so I wouldn’t have to run any more freakin’ laps.

I’m just not built for tracks. I know this, and I remembered it a couple of months ago when I tried to run in ovals around the Wheaton College 400. Dull, awful, and, despite the spongy-looking surface, absolute horror to my joints. That’s why I spend so much time running off-road: it’s prettier, it’s softer on the bones, and it isn’t the track.

I’ve been doing my running lately in the Forest Preserve. I’ve been running around Herrick Lake for the last few weeks, content to circle the one-mile circumference, rather than venture off, alone and winded, into the preserve itself. The area is perfectly pleasant, but I’m just not confident enough to sprint away from a would-be assailant if one appeared on the back end of my run. So I run in circles, varying the direction so that I wear out my ligaments in tandem. The last time I ran the lake, I did 7 full laps. I did the whole thing averaging about 6:50 per lap, and while I’ve done better, I felt okay with it.

Then someone at work told me that her GPS watch clocked the lake trail at 0.83 miles, and not 1.0. Crushed, but doubting that my little $10 Target pedometer could compete with a GPS watch (and determined to get find out how to get one for myself!), I brought Howard into the mix. We took to the Prairie Path on Friday, with Howard cycling beside me. According to the bike’s odometer, I run somewhere between 6mph and 7mph, which equates to approximately 9:15 per mile.

Nine minutes, when I thought I was running at 7. I’m sorry, but that is blisteringly slow. My god, how long will it take me to finish the 10k? An hour! Will the finish line even be up at that point? Will I be running into someone’s picnic because all the racers and their families, and the sponsors, have gone home? I can’t have that. I must run faster. I might not get to the pace I thought I was doing, but I can do better than nine minutes.

I went to the library and got all their books on running. The one that grabbed me was a Hal Higdon, apparently the Gucci of running-by-the-book-coaching. I plucked ‘Run Fast: How to Prepare for a 5k or 10k race’ and carried it home, unsure of the 1980s man on the cover, but hoping that running transcended fashion, and that the advice would still hold.

The book, while interesting, is clearly written for the hard core runner (100 miles per week) who is using 10k races as a speed workout. I find it funny that there are people who use my target race as a warm-up and/or workout in preparation for ‘real’ races. I’m trying to think how this would equate to me, and I guess it would be a book about how to get faster on the dash from the bed to the bathroom when I’ve drunk too much water before bed. Oh well, all things in perspective, I couldn’t walk to the corner last year without losing my breath, and today I can run for 4 miles before I start to make noises when I hit a hill.. Maybe by next year, I’ll be okay to lose a couple of toenails in the San Francisco marathon, because the hills make for good preparation to the flatter Chicago terrain.

Higdon’s book is all about using sprinter’s workouts to make distance runners stronger, and therefore faster. I’m in. I read about interval training, strides, sprints, fartleks (I swear that’s a real word), and using anaerobic drills to create greater aerobic capacity. I skipped over all of Higdon’s advice about postponing speed work until I’d run for a year, did at least 15 miles a week and had a ‘race pace’ based on some portfolio of competitive runs. I need to get faster now. Last Saturday, I packed up my boys, and off we went.

DS paced me for the first warm-up lap, but then his tiny legs gave out and he opted for walking, calling to me, ‘Mommy, you don’t go fast!’ No joke, kiddo! That’s why I’m pumping my arms like pistons around this stupid ellipse. Howard kept pace with DS, but they got ambushed by a pack of co-eds playing Frisbee football on the fake grass, and so they loped around the loop while I chugged and huffed my way through the drills. I did half a lap at nearly-full speed, and then a quarter-loop walking, and then started it all over again. I jogged 2 laps as a warm-up and did a final ‘victory’ half-lap at the end. By then, DS was melting and even Howard looked a little bit over-sunned. I figure I did about 3 miles, far less than a run, but my legs were tired and it felt good to blow the carbon out.

According to Higdon, I ran too fast. I should have been running at race pace, vs. all out. Well, tough. I don’t know what race pace is, and so I just went as fast as I could while still maintaining my form. I’m sore still, but it’s clearly muscular and not joint-related, and so I’m going ahead with my planned run tonight. And then on Thursday, after it cools down, it’s back to intervals at the lake, this time with full knowledge of its 0.83 secret.

Long runs increase endurance, but intervals increase fitness. Starting Thursday, and for the next month until the Fleet Feet gun goes off, I’m working on chipping my time down. I’ll beat the one-hour race time for sure, and maybe, just maybe, the adrenaline of the day and the other racers can lift me to my ‘race pace’, whatever that is. And then I’ll be back at it the very next workout, chiseling time off of that, too.

I have my long runs and my intervals now; things to alternate, each with their gifts, and each with their demands. I can get faster, and fitter, all at once, and so maybe next year when I lose a toenail, I won’t even notice.

That is, unless it happens on the track.

A the D(irt Hiker)