The Experiment, What I Learned and Where We Go from Here

After months of illness, I had no ability to run any distance (a mile was a lot), but I felt I could maybe train to run short track races like I did in high school. I'd noticed that since starting running ultras, and especially after getting hurt, that I'd lost my top-end speed and I wanted to see if I could get it back. The idea was to run a variety of short sprint workouts and see just what I could do.

I could run 100s and 200s well, but anything beyond that was bad; eventually I got up to 300m, but that was about it. And these were good for a 6 minute miler in training, not racing good. I still didn't have the speed I used to: I recently hit 4:08 pace, downhill, but I was doing 3:35-3:38 a decade ago and 2:55 a decade before that. This doesn't seem like normal aging. It was something else.

One of the results of very slow ultrarunning (as opposed to trying to win a 50K) was that my stride rate had dropped to as bad as 145 steps per minute. I'm back to 158 or so, for short runs and it's about a minute per mile difference. There's still something else.

My first few runs back from illness on the track left me with odd muscle pains, particularly in my calves. What I think was happening was increasing "stride stiffness" - you can read up on that in Brad Hudson's book - instead of absorbing shock, I was doing more of a springing motion and that was getting me moving faster. This goes back as far as Lydiard having athletes doing "hill springing" rather than just hill running, where they exaggerate the push off from ankle flexion.

After that, I had quad issues, pain and eventually minor injury. Running at top speed requires more from the quads than usual - and downhill running does not seem to help much in developing specific quad strength for that. There's a stronger upward knee lift, greater impact from a longer stride and a stronger back kick, all of which are slightly damaging to quads not used to it. Over a few weeks, however, I discovered that my stride was starting to return to what it had been before long-and-slow were everything.

Big questions

What would make me happy? What would I need to do to get there? and hardest of all: How could I make what I do look like what others would have me do?

At my age, a sub-21 minute 5K would be good; I'd be happy with that, even though it takes 18:30 to win anything in my age group (for comparison, I ran 22:12 last year). Training for sub-21, I could probably also run a sub-6 mile and that'd be a nice thing to do again. Training for these means easy runs in the 8:30 range, 9 at the worst, when I'd been running much much slower than that the past couple of years.

So, the past two weeks, though I haven't run more than 4 miles at a time, I've been running 8-8:30 pace again. When I can do that comfortably, daily, for a few weeks, I'll move on to the next step.

But you know me. I'll get distracted and think "I should run a marathon!" sometime soon.