Garbage miles

Monday, October 25, 2010

Marie called late in the afternoon for some advice. She’d been running tired lately, which is not uncommon this time of year for high school kids on cross country teams. It’s the week before Regionals and the most important race of the season for most of them…with a chance to compete in the state meet on the line. To me, it’s taper time. I believe in cutting total mileage back significantly over the two weeks leading up to the state meet, preferring quality…short fast intervals to running longer, slower ones. If the runner was doing 30 miles a week before conference championships, I’ll have them down to 20 the week before Regionals. This gets the legs fresh and the body and mind feeling fast…which is where I want them. She wanted to know if I thought taking a day off would be a bad thing. “Hay’s in the barn,” was all she needed to hear. I reminded her of all she’s done to this point to be ready for Saturday and that garbage miles were of no use. “Take a break…your body’s trying to tell you something,” I concluded.

My body was trying to tell me something, as well. I planned to run long. I wanted to get in my longest run since the hip had returned to health and figured on adding about a 15-minute loop to the Clear Creek course. I hadn’t been running 10 minutes though when I knew it was going to be a struggle. Yes…it was warmer than it’d been for at least three weeks and the humidity was probably in the ‘you’re going to sweat your ass off’ range. Still…I’d had two days without running and was not expecting the feeling that I was moving through in 3 feet of sludge. No matter…I was determined to run far…even if I ran slow…which I did. I started to worry when I say a cute, little wooly bear in the leaves though…and he passed me. During the heat of the summer, I don’t think I’d ever felt so sluggish. Still, I plodded on reaching the Girl Scout cabins in around 60 minutes. What I saw there brought me to a halt. A Metropark van was parked in the grassy field in front of the long abandoned cabins and an employee was boarding up the structures. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised since so often, when stopping there to do part of the Back to Basics workout, I’d noticed they were littered with beer cans. Kids were turning them into party huts and were destroying what was left of them. I don’t quite understand this kind of behavior, but there it was.

I finished my run so saturated that I was having troubles keeping my shorts up. I managed to log 66 minutes…or three more than my previous long run. I wasn’t proud of the speed, but the effort was much greater than the one I’d needed to hit my last pr. Running slow can be really painful.

Run duration: 66 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 140 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 1125.