RunRunLive Episode 5483 – The one about 5K’s and Relay races and retirement
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Hello my running friends.
How are you doing today? It’s winter here in New England. The shortest days of the year are upon us.
The seasons change and so do I.
Which is a lyric from a song by the Guess Who called “No Time”, from an album called “Canned Wheat” released in 1969. The Guess Who was an influential Canadian rock band from Winnipeg of all places.
Randy Bachman from the band went on to success with Bachman Turner Overdrive.
Apologies for not getting a show out. I have ideas in my head. I just don’t have the animation to write them down and record.
Something is better than nothing they say. But, the older I get, the more I understand the value of nothing as well.
Today I’m going to catch you up on a few races I’ve run and some other stuff as I work my way into shape for my next race, which is the Napa Valley Marathon in March.
Now that I’ve put Boston aside as a goal race, I can add more fun stuff and travel races to my calendar. This year my wife and I will head out to Napa Valley to run the race and then hang around in wine country.
Because, my friends, life is short.
Memento Mori.
First up!
I ran a Thanksgiving 5K.
I did a lot better than I thought I would. This the Ayer Fire Department 5K. I’ve run it since it began. It’s in a good spot on the calendar. It’s late enough to be after, and not conflict with any fall event on my calendar. It fits into one of those between season windows where I’m not really training and can run whatever I want.
This race always terrified me a bit because I just don’t run a lot of 5K’s. I don’t train for 5K’s. It’s a really short distance for me. For a 5K, you’re basically running as hard as you can right out of the start.
It’s just abnormal for me to try to run that fast.
That being said, I have run hundreds of short races over the years. I started running in high school cross country. All those races were super short.
So I do know how to run a short race. Go out hard and try to hang on.
That’s just a whole lot of discomfort. Not something I really look forward to.
One of the big challenges I have these days is warming up. I know from tracking my heart rate during training that it takes 15-20 minutes for my cardiovascular system to get going.
For a 5K that means I’m basically finished before I warm up.
These 5K’s are more social events for me. All my friends from my club are at the race and it’s good to see everyone on the holiday and get a little exercise prior to eating. To be honest, I’m operating with a clean slate since the knee issue of the last few years. My goals are very simple. Have fun, don’t hurt yourself.
I picked up my number the night before to avoid the morning crush. We had a nice cold, dry morning. I got there early enough to run a bit of a warmup. In fact, I timed it so well that I was worried I was going to mis the gun.
I jogged a simple out and back from the back of the corral. I was looking at my watch coming back and knew it was close to the start time. I ran right into the starting line from the back with less than 3 minutes before the start.
Cut it close.
The good news is it seemed to help. I got a decent 1.5 mile warm up and go into the start warm.
I was not racing from the front and took slot for myself well back in the pack.
There are something like 500 people in the race. Lots of kids and random citizens that probably only run this one race with family each year.
I like the kids, because they go out like their hair’s on fire and then you start catching them after the first mile and they look so sad.
I went out as easy as I could, trying to find what felt like a 75-80% effort tempo. Of course, the first mile was a bit fast, but I held effort and pace well enough, and never went deep into the pain cave. The knee was achy but behaved.
I ended up finishing with a pace that surprised me. It was much quicker than I thought that effort would yield.
Here you see the my new reality and the wonderfully positive impact of reduced expectations. Here’s a race pace that would have been terribly disappointing in another lifetime, but now is quite unexpected and pleasing.
The power of lowering your expectations!
Running unexpectedly well in a race is a mixed bag.
It feels great, but it also gives you ideas!
And I need to be careful to stay within my constraints!
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The second race I ran was the 2.5 mile leg of the Mill Cities Relay. Here’s another challenge with me and my buddies all getting older – it gets hard to find enough runners to fill a team! One of my running crew has been having some AFIB problems, (sound familiar?), and couldn’t run.
I sourced another runner from our club, but then she tripped on a training run days before the race and broke her arm!
I had to go deep into my network, but luckily my network of runners is deep! We got a sub, and we had a pretty good team.
Of course that didn’t keep us from blowing both of my hand offs.
I was running leg 3, the short leg, not because I’m any good at shorter distances, but because no one else wanted to do it. The short leg ends up being the hardest one logistically, because it’s, well, short.
We had some coordination challenges at the first hand off, because my #1 runner was leaving straight from the exchange, so I drove his car to the exchange and met my number 2 runner, who was the substitution, and had been dropped at the exchange by his wife.
We connected the two of them and sorted everything. We jumped in the pursuit vehicle and headed to exchange 2 where I would grab the baton.
As we pulled into the exchange I asked, “How much time do I have?” Someone said, “15 minutes” So I jumped out to start a 10-minute warm up.
Coming back from my warm up (at 7:40 of that proposed 15 minutes), I was doing a final pick up into the exchange area and was met by screaming race officials “171! Your runner is here!”
So once again I ran straight from my warmup into the race – from a pickup into the race leg!
I tried to hold good form and not blow up. I got passed a lot. But, I noticed that the pursuit car never passed me. So, I suspected that I might not have anyone to hand off to at the end.
Which was fine. The realization kept me from killing myself in the last few hundred yards into the exchange.
And, sure enough, I stood around for a few minutes waiting for my runner to show up.
So, yeah, we blew both of my hand offs. But, you know what? Nobody cared. We were out there to have fun, and our lackadaisical approach to logistics put an exclamation point on that.
We had a good time. I think we were still the fastest team from our club. Somewhere around 3:24 for 28 miles.
That’s it for this year.
Only race I have left is more of a fun run. That being the 10th anniversary running of the Groton Marathon. No one is running a full marathon. But, a bunch of use from my club will show up and do a variety of distances.
We set up our race clock. It is traditionally held of the last Sunday morning of December and this year that means the 31st, or New Years Eve (Day).
I’m going to run the ½ marathon version.
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Since it appears that this season of the RunRunLive podcast is going to be about aging and the challenges of the aging athlete, I’m going to offer you a brief article around retirement planning.
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Thank you for your ears my friends. When I’m retired one of the things I may focus on is more podcasting!
I have started a training cycle for the Napa Valley Marathon on March 3rd.
We’ll see how it goes. I get flashes of fitness where I bust out these fantastic training runs and then I have workouts where I have no energy, everything hurts and it fights me the whole way.
Ollie the Collie is doing well. He does all my training with me. He’s turned into a great runner. I’m going to change his nickname from Ollie the killer collie to Brother Ollie.
Ollie is one of the topics I will explore more in future episodes.
We haven’t gotten the super-cold weather yet. It’s been hovering around freezing, plus or minus. We haven’t gotten any snow so the trails are still passable. But we had so much rain there are still a lot of soft spots to navigate. Until we get the hard freeze. Then it will firm up.
This will be the last you hear from me before the holidays, probably.
I have some adventures queued up for the new year.
I hope you all, my old running friends find peace and joy and love. Cherish your time. Hold your loved ones close.
And I’ll see you out there.