Speed Kills

If you want to read about the race itself, I wrote an article about it for IMPACT Magazine. This story is about how I felt afterwards. That picture may be worth a thousand words, but I’m going to write another thousand.

When I run 10km I normally do it in about 55 minutes. Actually, 10km is usually my “hung over” distance. My typical run is in the 12-15km range and is quite hilly terrain. I’m not slow, but I don’t go incredibly fast either. I push myself a bit, but I find that if I go too fast then I end up hurting afterwards so I’ve found a challenging pace that allows me to run as much as I can find time for.

I don’t do races. They cost money. They start too early. There are too many people. I’m too competitive and don’t like losing. I like running on my own schedule. Whine, whine, whine. Prior to the most recent Underwear Affair race my best 10km time was 46:52, achieved at the 2008 Underwear Affair. This is becoming the one race a year that I do, mostly for seeing young women run in their underwear. That, and the beer.

In 2008 I came in 20^th out of 552 racers, but I’ll admit that this is more of a fun run than a competitive event. There is no prize money – just bragging rights. I felt that I’d given it a good effort that year, but for 2009 I was feeling pretty hyped and ready to give it everything I had. I wanted to find out just how fast I could go. I was going to use this race to determine what my best 10km could be. I even cheated a little, because I did something I never do: I popped two ibuprofen beforehand.

My time was 42:13, which got me 13^th out of 605 runners. I had shaved more than 4 and a half minutes off my personal best. Granted, the course wasn’t a swamp like the previous year, but that probably accounted for gaining a minute at the most. The improvement in time hadn’t come from changing the way I trained; I wasn’t in any better or worse shape this year. It came because it was the first time I’d ever pushed my body to its absolute limit to find out what I was capable of.

Afterwards I drank about two litres of water, ate some oranges and bananas, and then had a couple of beer. Then I went home and tried to sleep, my guts twisting and churning in turmoil from having deprived them of oxygenated blood during the run. I lay in bed half the night tossing, turning, and farting, feeling like my big guts were eating my little guts. Things finally mellowed around three AM and I slept until ten, which is unheard of for me. It is a rare Sunday that I’m out of bed after seven.

I was below my running quota for the week because I’d been saving my legs for the race, but the thought of a run was unimaginable. It wasn’t that I hurt; I wasn’t really that sore, but I was tired. Bone-freakin’ tired. I’d never been so exhausted in my life. It felt as if every cell in my body had been deprived of energy and was going to take its sweet time re-fueling. The act of shaving minutes off a personal best had drained me completely, and now it was time to pay for it.

That Sunday I was a total wastoid. I tried to eat healthy to get my energy levels back up, but I drank a few beer sitting on the couch too, which I’m sure didn’t help. Monday I was only slightly better. I did a weight workout and it was the lamest effort I’d made in years. Tuesday I skipped the weights because the kids had karate that night which meant a 14km run for me. I actually managed to do it, although I was a few minutes late getting back for the kids because I think it was the slowest time I’d ever managed. It took until Friday before I finally felt back to my old self again.

Because of this experience I’m convinced that it truly was a personal best. I can’t imagine having run that race any faster with my current level of conditioning. I also don’t think I’ll ever beat that time. Could I beat it? Absolutely. I know that with some changes to my training I could come in at under 40 minutes next year. If I wanted to get even more extreme I could drop about 20 pounds of muscle weight and get faster: maybe below 38 minutes. If I was 20 years younger and determined to reach my maximum genetic potential for a 10km race I think I could manage 35 minutes, which is still eight minutes slower than the world record.

I’ve got the genetic capabilities to be an okay runner as long as I’m willing to make the effort, but no matter how hard I might have trained in my prime I can’t imagine ever breaking the 35 minute mark. This is an unbreakable limitation based on who my parents are. As I wrote in my chapter on genetics, no amount of training will ever allow a person to go beyond the limitations of their genes.

This is all moot, of course. I don’t want to change the way I train because I like running the way I do now, and I sure as hell don’t want to drop 20 pounds of muscle.

Forty-two minutes and thirteen seconds. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Good enough.

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