Road season ended early for me. It ends early for almost everyone now. Sure there was GMSR this weekend and there are a few crits in September still holding out against the encroachment of cyclocross, but I'm capitulating. For the fall season I will race 'cross, maybe not as seriously as some of you guys, but I'll be out there. My plan is to do most of the same races I did last year, maybe double up on a few more weekends, we'll see. And mix in some running races, as the calendar is full of good ones during harvest fair season. Not sure about du's, but if one comes up on a rare open date I'll consider it.
So I've been secretly running twice a week all summer, a first for me. You might remember my last running race was the Derry 16 miler back in January, and that did not end so well. In fact everything from the 8-mile mark onward was a mistake, as I started to experience some serious hip pain, but like an idiot I kept going. That pretty much tanked my winter running, but with rest the problem subsided and on the bike I had no issues, or no hip issues to be more precise. I focused on bike racing all spring, and raced every weekend from April until Memorial Day at the Killington Stage Race. Then I took a break, then started running easy, then working in weeknight time trials beginning in late June, moving to a bunch of crits in July and early August. That all went fairly well, and I either won primes or finished top 10 in every race all summer I think, with a few podiums. So the running did not hurt so much. I did stop running for the week of the Workingmans and then again the week before D2R2. I'm crazy but I'm not stupid.
I've had no issues with my hip thus far. Back in May, I met Patsy at CPTE in Nashua while working at my sponsor Goodale's Bike Shop on super sale day. Patsy had a booth for her business setup in the store and she worked with me a bit when we each had some down time during the day. She really knows her stuff and her diagnosis was that I have some mobility problems in my SI joint and this was leading me to have a right leg that is functionally longer than the left. I've written about this before. Well, this condition has probably existed in me as long as I've been an athlete, but nobody ever explained it to me like this before. I've always known I was severely out of balance laterally, but never knew what to do about it. This summer I've been doing some exercises Patsy recommended and so far they're helping. My hips and back feel "free-er" and I think it's helped my TT positioning as well as my pedaling (both right/left balance as well as better power at high cadences). I can't stress enough how strongly I feel that us old fucks need to devote a considerable portion of our available training time to "structural fitness." It's senseless to bang your head against the wall doing intervals if your training is leaving you hunched and limping. Just sayin'...
Of course I'm not running many miles. Like I said, just twice a week, really short, like 30 minutes at first. The past month I've stretched it out, but nearly all my runs have been in the Blue Hills, with about 50% of the time spent on rugged trails. Some are so steep that it's not even "running" in the traditional sense, as I need to make foot plants wherever I can, thus every stride is a different length. Not as repetitious as running on asphalt, but far more stressful from both hip flexor and cardiovascular standpoints. This is like intervals. I've run up the access road a few times too. Lately I'm up to about an hour, as that just fits in after work when I really don't have enough time for a decent ride at this time of year.
No speedwork or timed runs though, so going in to the Walpole race I had no idea what pace I'd be able to maintain. Last year I also did this as my first race of the fall, with nearly zero run training, and did a 42:50, 6:54 pace on the tough rolling course. So I hoped to do better than that, but that's all I knew. Before the race I stretched a lot, doing the usual dynamic stuff along with some other moves Patsy had showed me to loosen my SI joint, but I warmed up very little. Basically the same things I do for a training run. Lining up with my buddy T-Vo, I had no plans to stay with him as he's been running pretty decent lately. At the start I focused on good form and staying within myself, being conservative. I've had three LT tests in the past two years, one on a treadmill and two on a bike, and I've got a pretty good idea of where my thresholds are by HR. My run pacing used to suck, with fast starts and horrible declines, but I've learned a lot. First mile was 6:38, faster than expected, but my HR was only 140 and I felt good. Second mile goes down and then back up, and I was 6:41, 144, so far so good. Third mile has some downhill, hard to judge. It was 6:34 with my HR hovering right around my OBLA of 150 bpm, and I could push it up or dial it back at will. The fourth mile was tougher, with some little hills and a tight loop around a neighborhood. There is a 5k at this event too, and most runners did that, with only 180 people in the 10k, so I was in no-man's land. The 4th split at 6:49 so I hoped I was not falling apart. But I was still around 150 for an HR and with less than 15 minutes to go I figured I should start ramping it up. The fifth mile goes through the start area backward and then into a big downhill, with longer sight lines where I could see I was catching two guys. That was my fastest split at 6:26. The last mile passes through the center of town but it's almost all uphill. I may have started emptying the tank a little too early because with a half mile to go when I passed the second guy, I was already at 165 bpm, pretty close to max. With three minutes still to run, uphill... So yeah, the last mile was not that much fun, but I pulled it out in 6:31 before dieing significantly in the final .217 for an official time of 41:05.
That may be the most even set of splits I ever put up in a middle distance race. The 6:37 average pace was 17 seconds/mile faster than last year, but still about 25 s/m off the times I was putting up in 2007 and 2008 races. Last year I rallied to run sub-39 at both the Firefighters 10k in Dorchester and the Canton Fall Classic, both in October, and both on my schedule for this year. My goal is to do a bit better in those, with nothing longer than that in the plans at this time. Stop rolling your eyes Jonny, you need to rest up for cross. Thanks for reading.
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