Miserable race

My alarm was set for 4.30. I got up, turned it off, and went back to sleep. If it weren't for a strange dream involving my family demolishing our house and moving to Fern Tree gully to act as a fire break for a hotel, I wouldn't have woken up for quite a few hours past the start of the race.

I've been sleeping a lot this past week. 10 hours a day minimum. It wasn't especially refreshing either, I'd still be bone tired during the day despite dropping my mileage by 50%. I wasn't quite sure why, but I have a sneaking suspicion that was partly confirmed today, that it might be from overtraining.

The first two weeks of this training macrocycle, I was feeling rather good. My shin wasn't bothering me, the mileage felt fairly easy, and I had a break through tempo run. The third week was much more of a struggle. I bombed a few workouts, having to stop, muscles quivering from glycogen depletion, with a good portion of the time still on the clock. Still I managed to do 44k on Sunday to round up a 160k week, so I was happy with that.

It looks like it cost me though. My reduced workouts have felt tougher than they should've and although my muscles felt recovered the day after the long run, I wasn't feeling fresh. Then to compound things, this morning, I had another shocker of a race. Went out with the leaders at what felt like an incredibly easy pace, and finding myself unexpectedly in third place, I consciously backed off and dropped back to 10th like I'd planned. I was feeling good for the first 2k, 3:48 pace was clicking over nicely, and then just like that, I started fading. By 3k I was down to 3:55 pace. By 4k I was at 4:00/k and the last 500m of the first lap were a death march after an innocuous set of hills. Went through 5k in 20:15, and knew I didn't have a shot of breaking 40 let alone 38. The second lap was horrible. I was on my own, dropped long ago by the pack, my shoe lace was undone and I was feeling shit. At 6k I had given up any chance of getting a respectable time and just wanted to stop and walk back to the start line and pretend I'd only signed up for 5k. I did stop for a few seconds to do up my shoe laces and let three guys who'd been about to pass me, do their thing. In that time, I decided I was just going to use it as a tempo run and go by effort not pace. It worked for a while as a I quickly passed two of the guys who'd passed me, but I just couldn't get into a rhythm. I ended up employing the 'last dregs' pacing strategy: death marching, then as the footsteps crept too close, sprinting to buy just a little more time. I held them off for about 2k, but then presented with a gentle hill I couldn't hold it for long enough and they crept past me. After that I didn't even bother trying to preserve my place any longer and just jogged, reasoning that I'd save my energy for the final straight. That was about the only good thing about the race. The last 500m went gun-barrel straight parallel to Racecourse Road and I kicked down it like a rabid mule. There was a pack of about 20 people 200m in front of me and I wasn't going to let a single one of them beat me to the finish. With 300m to go I was drawing level with them, but two of the front guys wearing Athletics Victoria uniforms had started their kick and I was starting to feel the whole body shivers that accompany that kind of effort. But they were in their late 50s and I was young and frustrated and they didn't stand a chance.

It's funny how easy it is to sustain the pain of sprinting full out for a short distance even though it hurts so much more than doing 3:45/k for 10km. It's probably an evolutionary relic from the days of chasing down your prey with spear and loincloth. The alacrity of that final spurt meant the difference between watching your young uns grow up strong and healthy and a slow death of malnutrition. Every step on that last straight brought me closer to my goal and my body knew the faster it moved, the less time it would have to spend in pain.

My time? 43:30, which is 5 seconds faster than I did in my first 10k race. Those days I was lucky to get 20km in per week and 10km was longer than I'd ever run before. You can understand how crushing it is to only slightly exceed that performance despite training 800% more. I've been training like an elite athlete, but according to that race, I'm very much stuck in the bottomless depths of mediocrity.

The whole attraction of running for me is this concept of 'ascension'. Every training run is making me stronger, faster, and that is why I'm willing to go out there two or even three times a day. In a way it is like those poor souls who call themselves flaggelants. By whipping their bodies into pitiful seas of sores and open cuts, they hope to bring themselves closer to god, to have a revelation, to atone for their sins and overwhelmingly to become better people. I can empathise with them but running is on a completely separate set of parameters, far divorced from such masochism.

My training is rarely painful. Most runs are completely relaxed, time spent reflecting on things I don't otherwise have time to reflect on. Sometimes that elusive 'runner's high' appears and in those runs it is as if I'm encased in a bubble, isolated from the outside world. There is no sensation of effort because I am not moving - the world is simply spinning under my feet. Thoughts quicken and problems that have been plaguing me are quickly unlocked without the distracting influences of the world outside the bubble. I am unable to hold back a smile as analgesic hormones flood my system. The encounter will not last though and the more I struggle to keep the feeling from leaving, the quicker the bubble will burst. The memories remain though, and every run I leave the house hoping it will emerge from the hidden alcove within me.

At this moment, after the race, I feel like my progress has been halted and I don't understand why. Maybe it was an off-day, maybe I'm overtrained. Who knows?

Sandown is in two weeks. Maybe 'Australia's fastest race' will drag me out of this pit. In the mean time I'll just keep plugging away and hopefully this funk will disappear.