My subprime qualification for the A wave of the Bolder Boulder 10K (and 2.32 digressions)

It's hard to be a runner living in Boulder and find ways not to enter the Bolder Boulder 10K, unless you're me and straddle the line between being a lazy jogger and someone with equally lazy hopes of returning to serious competition.

I've been present for three runnings of the event. In 2011, I watched some of the earlier waves -- there are about 100 of them and they go from fastest to slowest, with the earliest start at about 6:50 a.m. and the latest at at 9:25 a.m., with the pros taking off at 11:15 a.m. -- from about the one-mile mark. In 2014 I watched from various points along the course, catching sight of the men's and women's leaders this time. Last year I was close to the finish when the pros churned up the last ugly hill on Folsom Street and onto Stadium Drive.

This year, having been fairly consistent with, if not ambitious about, my "training" since midwinter, and experiencing many missed days thanks not only to laziness but to work commitments (another dubious feather in my slacking-cap; I used to regularly put in 90- to 100-mile weeks while working over 40 hours) I decided to give it a participatory go. But I didn't want to do it unless I could get into the A wave. Qualifying for the individual waves takes many forms, and since I have developed a late-onset allergy to actually racing, I decided the least painful way to go about this would be to run two miles on a treadmill at 10.6 MPH (5:39.6 pace) at the seasonal Bolder Boulder Store near 28th Street and Arapahoe. The powers-that-be equate this with a sub-38:00 10K.

My preparation for this was pedestrian. (I'm surprised I haven't found occasion to deploy that awful pun before today.) In the week ending Sunday, I didn't run less than an hour on any of the seven days, although I didn't exceed 74 on any of them either. I did what might be construed as a couple of tentative interval workouts, which would be more aptly called "track fartleks," in which I take to the oval at Fairview High School for repeats of 400 to 800 meters with no real plan in terms of pace, recovery, or attitude. I also did a few of these during my month-long stint in Massachusetts from mid-April to mid-May. They were all about the same: run at about 5:20-5:30 pace until I felt like stopping for any reason, none of them compelling. I did enough of these to analyze the scattershot data and convince myself I could run 5:40 pace without killing myself for eleven-plus minutes.

I was actually going to take the test last week, but I kept putting it off until I really couldn't anymore -- I'm meeting some friends at the Prefontaine Classic in Eugene on Thursday and they don't have any Bolder Boulder stores there that I know of. So yesterday afternoon I parked the car in the lot that services the store and headed off on a warm-up.

This warm-up was emblematic of a lot of things about my recent running. I almost can't run by myself without music anymore, so I had my Android with me, blasting a thrum of big-beats jams and Eighties tracks into my beleaguered eardrums. I traveled east along the Boulder Creek Path, and when I neared the Arapahoe Avenue underpass and saw one of this path's many overlapping mile and half-mile markers, I picked it up to what I thought was somewhere safely on the sunny side of 7:00 pace. I started to suck a little bit of wind, and as I reached the next mile marker I was really hoping I had underestimated my pace. I had; I'd managed a 6:02. I jogged into the very pretty underbrush and left something unpretty there -- what runners like to call "gastrointestinal distress" is much more often "anorectosigmoidal urgency" -- and then headed back the other way. This time, having courted the pace I'd need to run on the treadmill if I ever actually made it there, I decided to try to match it for a half-mile. I disengaged by earphones and, balled-up shirt in one hand on Android in the other to ensure perfect balance, pattered along at what I hoped was about 5:40 pace.

I was soon overtaken by a guy on roller blades who looked like a very fit mid-forties type, very Boulderly. He was Boulderly vocal as he drew alongside. "Wow!" he enthused. "You must be looking at a top age-group time at Bolder Boulder next week! A-waver! 45 to 50, right?"Whoa, sir! I was feeling very comfortable, but this shit? It was okay that I thought that he looked my age, but him thinking I looked his? With his appraisal made mostly from the rear? Horrors.

But I didn't skip a beat. "That's the idea," I told him, just as brightly. "I'm 46."

"Oh, WOW!" he exclaimed, as if he hadn't already pinpointed either my age or my approximate speed. "You're top 15 easy at that pace!" (At the Bolder Boulder, they give out medals for people in the top 15 in each single-age age "group." I didn't learn this until later that evening.) "What are you lookin' to hit?"

"Maybe 37 minutes," I lied (more on this dissembling shortly).

"Well, I won't be in it this year," he offered, starting to pull away, "because my son's in AA." The next wave behind A is AA, and I can only assume that he was talking about this use of the term and not the more popular one.

I was actually happy for this distracting interlude, because before I knew it I was a half-mile along, getting there in 2:46 and feeling better than I had during my mile pick-up. I jogged back to the store -- I won't go into detail about doubling back a half-mile or so to collect the earbuds I'd dropped and were still lying there -- having run for about 35 or 40 minutes.

So, it was time.

I hate running on treadmills in general. Most people I know do. Others prefer it. Today it was far preferable to actually racing, because I wouldn't have the option of bailing very easily like I would without a moving belt under my carcass. I estimated my chances of being physically capable of running the required time without actually experiencing real distress at 85 to 90 percent, and knew that only my mind was likely to put paid to my quest.

A very helpful and chipper woman named Nina got me set up with the right forms -- an entry blank and a waiver for the test itself, assuring the staff that I wouldn't sue anyone if I became a candidate for a video like this -- and then I hopped on the machine.

"You speed it up until you think you're ready to start being timed," Nina instructed. "Then I'll keep track of your mileage." This treadmill gave distance covered in 0.01-mile increments, so I started it up and went pretty quickly from 10:00 pace to 7:30 pace to 6:40 pace to 5:39.6, holding the last speed for about five seconds before saying, "Go." The treadmill told me I'd covered 0.32 miles. "You can hit the stop button when you get to 2.32!" Nina consoled me, and headed off to deal with another customer, evidently confident that I wouldn't find a way to cheat while her back was turned.

The first few minutes felt easy, other than that annoying bunching-up one tends to engage in when running at higher speeds on a treadmill, which results, for me at least, in a too-high arm carriage (mustn't strike the console) and a higher-than-optimal stride rate. A young guy on the machine next to me was gunning for a 12:15 (good for an AA-wave bib) and nearing the last few minutes, so I started encouraging him by way of encouraging myself and taking my attention off the view of the parking lot out the window a few feet away. Hey, I was just paying it forward after my exchange with the roller-blades dude. "Thanks!" he wheezed. "Never run on a treadmill!" I think he was saying he'd never run on a treadmill before this test, but either way it sounded like sage advice. (He made it in style.)

When the read-out rolled over to 1.00, the games began. I told myself I only had to cover another mile and a half and I'd be done, easy as a walk in the park, only faster. (I've employed a variation on this trick in almost every marathon I've run: When I get to 23 miles, I tell myself, "Only twenty more minutes," at 24 I say "Just fifteen more, and at 25 it's on to "Ten minutes left!" On a good day, these "estimates" always became progressively more cynical, meaning optimistic, with the apparent goal being to reach the finish line somehow surprised that I didn't have to run for another three or four minutes.)

When the read-out kicked over to 1.50, I was working a little harder, but still keeping my breathing "tempo-like" (inhale for two steps, exhale for two) rather than "race-like" (inhale for one step, exhale for two). I was no longer intent on telling myself I had more left to run than I did, but I tried anyway. Then I decided I would be done at 2.00 -- coming right up! -- and could celebrate by cooling down for a third of a mile at the same pace I was already running. Vacillating between these two competing and equally silly schemes chewed up time, if nothing else, so I was okay with it.

When I reached 2.00, I knew I was going to do it. I had lapsed into 1:2 breathing, but that was okay. My legs felt a little beat-up from the labors of the past week-plus, but not bad. Subjectively, I felt like I usually do at the same point in a real 5K race, as best as I could remember that sensation -- keep in mind that I have not completed a serious, wire-to-wire competitive running event in over nine years, making context almost worthless. When I get into whatever top form is for me as a fogie, I am obviously going to be much slower than I was during my salad days as a 31- to 34-year-old, but by how much? And superimposed on that, how far from that "top form" has my lackluster training taken me? That part I can't know yet, but I was mulling over all of these things as I headed into the last couple minutes of the test. I was aware of having paced myself with preternatural efficiency to this point.

Nina appeared then, crisply looking at the display and then at me, pseudo-military-style. "You're gonna do it," she declared. "Remember the number 2.32!" Funny, I thought, I've been finding every damn way there is to think about every number between zero and 46 except for that one.

I could have kicked it in like one of those old maniacs you see at 5Ks, straining to beat someone half as tall and a fifth as old as he is and much less stinky to boot -- really, I could have! -- but the idea seemed somehow unwise. 2.29 rapidly gave way to 2.32 and I punched the fat red oh-shit button on the console.

No hands on knees, I silently preached. These days there's always a fuckin' camera recording your antics.

I was pleased. There is always a big difference between knowing I can do something and knowing that I will do it, and it has applications woven throughout my daily life far more critical than this one did. I'd earned my proper placement, and paid the $70 for a bib and the long-sleeve T-shirt option.

I thanked Nina and headed out for a few more miles to survey the last mile of the course itself, which involves a flat stretch of about a kilometer after the turn south from Walnut onto Folsom, followed by a gradual and non-trivial climb up Folsom, right onto Stadium Drive past the six-mile mark, and left onto Folsom Field itself, home of the perennially success-challenged University of Colorado football team.

On the matter of what I actually hope to do with that hard-earned bib number A112, at the unspeakable hour of 6:50 a.m. five days from now, that's easy. One of my good friends is a CPA who, pretty much every March, is in about 35:00 sea-level 10K shape before the tax accountant's version of fraternity hazing keeps him awake and largely off the roads until mid-April. He's got an A-bib and just wants to tempo through the race in 39:30 to 39:50. I think I can keep him company at 6:20 pace without undue misery. One of my other occasional training partners is a woman who has run 16:30-ish on the track and 2:46 for the marathon, and more recently about an hour for ten windy miles, and at her current stage of fitness (none of us are ever really fit, you understand; that's for next season) might be part of the fun if she doesn't decide to dust us.

One thing to keep in mind about the Bolder Boulder course is that it is deceptively slow. Or maybe there's nothing deceptive about it. There's the requisite 1:00 to 1:15 you lose to the 5,300' to 5,400' altitude, but the course itself is a restless bear. You climb fairly steadily for the first 2.7 miles -- nothing awful, about 40' per mile -- before rolling your way the highest point of the course on 13th Street just after four miles. Then, unless you're already toast, you're rewarded with your fastest mile of the day as you scamper and descend through downtown, and you can actually keep rolling nicely until you have about 600 meters left. Then you almost certainly perform in such a way as to add a couple of seconds per mile to your overall pace before finishing up on the football field.

In total, the course gains 66' from beginning to end, is virtually never flat, and throws the two distinct hills of real consequence at you in the last third of the race. Most people who are relatively fast -- say 32:00 sea-level types -- lose about two minutes from an idealized course, with substantial interpersonal variation depending on their level of altitude acclimation (which in turn seems to hinge on sea-level O2 saturation at rest -- usually 97 or 98 percent in healthy subjects).

That's substantial interpersonal variation. I'm trying to find a coherent way to make sense of Josephat Machuka's course record of 27:52 from 1995, and I can't do it. The average human loses about 3 percent in performance at Boulder's altitude, which would knock that 27:52 down to a 27:02 or so at sea level if it applied to Machuka, which is clearly off the table. If this course were at sea level I cannot see any way short of mechanized transport that anyone could run 4:30 pace on the thing. Maybe Machuka was so inflated with EPO that you could practically see the letters on his forehead, and maybe he wasn't, but I don't care -- no one runs what has to be worth close to 26-flat on a track, anywhere. That's in the realm of the Chinese extragalactic marks from the 1993 and 1997 Ma Junren days. So, it's safe to drop the idea of 3 percent for altitude as a general rule. I understand that East African runners and their forebears have been living at altitude for a zillion generations, but still -- a dude needs oxygen to run fast.

Machuka's performance 21 years ago has, all by itself, led countless observers, absent other data, to shrug and conclude. "Altitude ain't that big a deal. Course ain't that tough" and, as often occurs at the wondrous and nonexistent intersection of anonymous Web postings and MENSA candidacy, malign the efforts of everyone else. Okay.

When I blurted out to fired-up roller-blader guy that I was looking at 37 minutes, I was possibly thinking that I could run under 38:00 if I really pushed it. That's a definite maybe, but I don't intend to find out. That would mean the ability to run in the 35's at sea level and I'm not thinking I'm there yet. My 11:19 on the treadmill, which I will treat as transferable to a genuine running surface, is probably worth a sub-11:00 at sea level. If you take me at my word that I was prepared to hold on for another mile yesterday if absolutely necessary, and I'm not sure I do, that yields close to 17:00 for 5K. Reaching even further into my ass, that would be in the high-35:00 ballpark. But, no. I am planning to run a marathon in October and prep for it (by the way, do you know about "preppers"? Great stuff) with some summer track and road races, but I would prefer not to really test myself until I am somewhat assured that I will be OK with the result. I haven't always treated myself kindly in my nine years away from racing, and if I can ever again run a 5K at my PR half-marathon pace (5:13), I will declare myself the master of my own domain. Which I haven't been for a long time now, but that's digression number 2.33 and will be tabled for the time being.

(Since you weren't wondering, I drew the title of this post from a recent quest on my other blog to learn more about the financial world.)