Do you know the feeling you get when you’re out biking and
fly down a huge hill at nearly out-of-control, careening, reckless speed? Maybe
I was a little too much of a daredevil as a child but I have so many memories
of doing this, both in my neighborhood growing up and on our annual vacations
to Acadia National Park where we would bike carriage trails. Something about
the feeling of speed has always fascinated me. Aren’t you a little surprised that
I haven’t ended up in a more dangerous career? I suppose that I’m satisfying
this need for speed through my running. Those few moments where you feel like
you’re practically gliding and could accelerate more and more: those are what I
train for. Sure, I have some goal times that I want to hit in my lifetime, but
it’s really all about the feeling. Recently
I have started to get that feeling back. An hour run is now the norm, and my
speedwork has progressed past the point of slogging through intervals to
something more decent. This past weekend I even stepped foot on a track for the
first time in months. I had impeccable timing too, sneaking onto a Catholic
boys school track during Open House weekend. Hey, maybe a post-grad female running
repeat 800s around their track could boost their applicant pool…some good old
bait ‘n switch action.
Back to out-of-control speeds, I found these great videos on
a letsrun forum post…
They are Asics ads of people trying to run at elite marathon
pace. The second one is clearly not a
fair race because Ryan Hall has a running start, and we all know that even if
matched perfectly for speed with someone, they’d smoke us in a sprint if they
get a running start. Right now I’m
thinking about those indoor track workouts that I did in college where we’d
have a 10m run-in, I'm pretty sure I'd never have come close to hitting my splits without the run-in. Oh wait, we never hit our splits anyways.
Until next time,
Robyn “can’t pass as a catholic boy” Runner
No comments:
Post a Comment