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(Re-)learned a valuable lesson

August 28, 2018 (Night)

Exercise Type: Run

Weather: 90 degrees, 90% humidity (I'm making this up, but it's how it felt)

Comments:
If you're reading this, there's a happy ending and a good tip about running so bear with me...

I finally discovered what I'd been missing all summer... excruciating humidity. Northern Europe it turns out just doesn't get that hot. The heat wave they're been complaining about all summer? Low to mid-80s mostly, and reasonably dry. They're just not used to it, and they don't have AC or fans in a lot of places which sucks if you're trying to sleep but makes no difference as far as running is concerned. But this weather is Boston... oppressive! I felt like I'd suddenly switched to training at altitude - the same effort as last week seem to only get me going half as fast.

The workout was 8x800m with 2 minute recoveries. I didn't know this when I started however because I showed up late and then had a crazy notion that it would be "cool" to just start running with the other guys and see where we stopped. I caught on pretty quickly that we were doing repeats 8s, but for some reason I assumed we were only doing 4, and so went into my 3rd and 4th one expecting a longer recovery in my near future, followed by something at a slower pace. When I asked "what's next" and learned that we were about to do what we'd just done all over again, my heart sank. The heat and the lack of people around me (I was solidly between the two halves of my group) and the fact that I wasn't chatting with any friends on the cooldowns left me wallowing in a puddle of self-pity. And self-pity, in case you haven't realized by now, is the arch-nemesis of the long-distance runner. Nothing short of injury is more damning to your performance. Hills, rain, sleet, heat, rocks, and wind don't hold a candle to the power of self-pity to sap your spirit and undermine your efforts. I was in a bad place. I remember thinking durin that ugly 5th lap, gee, I could really use another Matt Simonson to materialize on the edge of the track and start cheering for me right about now. But the only Matt Simonson around was on the track, and I realized that I'd have to find that cheering from within.

Or, at least, find excuses to cheer myself up. I looked at the pretty sunset. I basked in the spotlights illuminating the track. I created mental landmarks for myself to lift my spirits, like reaching the 300m mark, or the 600, or rounding the final curve. But those motivations were fleeting. I needed something more long-lasting to sustain me, or else I would be tempted to find an excuse to drop out. And then I came to me: Aladdin!

At the start of the 6th lap I started singing to myself from the first step "I can a show you a worrrrrrrld! Shining shimmering splendid! Tell me princess..." You get the idea. Having a really upbeat Disney song as opposed to dreary scottish ballad I'd had stuck in my head all day did wonders to lift my spirits. From the first step I was in the lead pack. Not just hanging on or chasing them but really in the midst of it, right behind the lead runner. Instead of continuing to get slower, as I had thought was inevitable about my dismal 5th pickup, I ran a whopping 12 seconds faster, blowing my previous times out of the water. The timer asked as soon as I crossed the line "are you doing two more?" and I gasped "Yep!" before I had a chance to think about it. I hadn't realized dropping out at 6 was a legit option, but apparently, nearly everyone else did except for the three runners ahead of me.
It would have been so easy to drop out too, saying that I'd finished on a good note, but simply having committed out loud already to doing two more was enough of a mental nudge to keep me from backing out. On the 7th I let the guy who leading get way ahead from the get-go and allowed the other two to pass me in the second lap, but then I remembered something Anthony had said last to me last week about how runners tend to resign themselves to being on a certain wrung in the pecking order, to always be the fifth runner right behind two of your friends who you probably are just as fit as, but you've told yourself you can't catch them.

"Screw that," I told myself, "I will prove him wrong!" With that I put on a glorious kick, catching up the #3 guy who had fallen off the first two, who (no doubt since he thought of himself as the #3 guy) wasn't gonna let me take his job away from him. As we battled it out neck-in-neck, we ended up pulling even with the first two guys, leaving him trapped behind them and me free to pass in lane 2. And that is how, in a desperate bid not be 4th, I ended up in first, surprising everyone as I burst exhausted across the line. "I'm done!" I announced. But of course, 7 is a weird number of pickups to do. We almost never do an odd number in fact (nor does GDS), and I knew somewhere deep down that if I'd just improved my time by 10 seconds and matched it again the following pickup, there was no legitimate reason I needed to drop out. You drop out of a workout when you're hurt or when your times are spiraling out of control, not when you've just pulled off a stunning improvement. So in spite of saying I was done, I jumped in for one more, telling myself if I could just hang with those guys for the first lap, I'd finished with a decent time no matter what I did on the second. I ended up completely alone the second lap, but it turned out that three of them were doing way faster than they had before, and I finished only a second slower than my heroic 6th and 7th pickups. Afterwards, I stumped around the track for 5 minutes occasionally opening one eye to keep from walking into the bleachers, and then lay down sprawled in lane 6 of the homestretch in a glorious star stretch, my sweat leaving a human shape on the rubber like the outline of a victim's body at a crime scene (too dark? how about a snow angel?).

So if you've made it to the end of my saga (or skipped ahead to find out what I learned) my message for you is this: don't confuse actual pain with self-pity. You may think you're hopelessly tired, but if you make a big effort to catch up to the pack in front of you as Ana-Sophia did last Thursday on the tempo and as I did tonigh, you may discover that going fast with friends or even rivals is easier than going slow on your own.

Laps:
2:48
2:52
2:51
2:48
2:52
2:40 (holy shit!)
2:40 (again!)
2:41 (not so bad!)

Distance Duration Pace Interval Type Shoes
6.5 Miles Interval