Options for "Assuming I find a reason to bother" rust-buster track sessions

Re-learning the art of suffering versus a valid fitness check

In theory, I’m probably about six weeks from being able to run a 5K or 10K race about as fast as I ever will. I’ve been doing enough daily jogging so that a couple of harder sessions a week for about a month and a half would surely get me close to my current potential, which barely causes the needle on a standard-issue voltmeter to twitch. Anyone who puts in an hour a day even at a lazy clip is on “competitive standby” in this way, although it probably helps to be 23 or 33, not 53.

I could re-commit myself to time-goal-oriented running in one of two primary ways. One would be to do a set of repetitions at a “fast” pace, and the other would be a time trial in which I set off at a given speed and commit to holding that speed until I no longer can.

The first scenario could involve a workout like eight times 400 meters with a strict 90-second, 200-meter moving recovery. I would start at a pace that felt like one- to two-mile race pace and simply stick with the prescribed recovery until the thing was over, regardless of any progressive slide in rep times.

The second option would mean starting off at, say, 80 seconds per lap, an experiment that would end after perhaps four or five laps, or 90 seconds per lap, which I might be able to do for 15 to 20 minutes. I really don’t know.

The first choice would be mentally easier, other than having to repeatedly start up again after stopping. No matter how not-into-it I am, I can generally focus my attention for long enough to run one hard lap at a time. Even though 400-meter reps now take me far longer than a minute, I still think of them as taking “about a minute,” and hell, anyone can do anything physically challenging for a mere minute. On the other hand, even if I can consistent times and could correlate the overall sensation with a workout in my “prime,” I wouldn’t really have a good idea afterward of how fast I could run in a race.

The second option would be mentally and, in most ways, physically harder, and at this stage I would quit after at most three laps no matter the selected pace unless I were following someone. But if I did this one honestly—and I have done sessions before even though they can be poly-unpleasant—then I would have an immediate and real read on my competitive fitness. And the “slow” option would be the better one, since it is more germane to whatever my current race-pace range turned out to be.

I would suggest the second option for most healthy runners coming back from a competitive hiatus and looking for the least psychologically prickly form of ice-breaker. I myself, however, have no interest in any of this and it’s best if we’re frank about this for once and for all, even if we’re not sure if this is mostly common sense or mostly the personal nihilism defining most of my waking and probably unconscious moments. I still like to run hard, but with as little context as possible. If I run on a track or accurately measured road segment and speed up to six-minute pace, the reality of what hard work this has become sets in alarmingly quickly, and I quickly retreat from whatever compelled me to even start timing myself.

According to sources, between Boulder’s altitude and the expected deterioration in running performance of a 53-year-old male compared to his under-35 prime, a given level of sustained effort now translates to a time 20 percent slower than it did when I was at my fittest. The age-53 records are about 16 percent slower than the open-standard records, while the elevation penalizes performance by around 3.5 percent.

If I multiply my various personal bests by 1.2, the resulting times are all very, very slow. This is not surprising; in fact, it’s the mathematically inevitable result of starting with times that objectively suck with and multiplying them by a number greater than 1.0. Specifically, I come up with a 5K in the very high seventeens, a 2:53 marathon, and a host of alarmingly glacial intermediate marks.

What I find interesting is that I’m not embarrassed about my best times, and despite my occasional benders in those years, I don’t think I could have run much faster than I did. Those benders were ruinous from a general standpoint, but rarely kept me from running from more than 10 to 14 days. Because I was almost never injured, I probably spent less time on the shelf overall than most people who train about as hard and race about as fast as I do.

My body tolerated most of my brain’s antics graciously and more often responded by thriving than breaking down. If I fell significantly short of my potential, it was because I didn’t train properly or push myself very hard. While I can see areas in which I deviated from conventional wisdom, the fact is that I couldn’t have been much faster than I was, and although I was hard on myself, I think I managed to answer the question “How good a marathon runner can I be?” within a very small margin of uncertainty, which is more important than how fast I actually ran.

The logical result of this picture is that I should be as happy to run a sub-18:00 5K at altitude this year as I was to run under 15:00 at age 34. The age-grading charts aren’t perfect for self-evident statistical reasons, but they represent a reasonable estimate for anyone used to suck and therefore will continue to suck at every increasingly dismal age he dubiously permits himself to attain.

For whatever reason, this would not be the case. The idea of running a well-executed all-out 5K in 17:59 on flat pavement strikes me as radically pointless, even offensive, even if this would be just as good as (or—let’s be optimistic here—no uglier than) the personal bests that I can recite without shame or remorse. I don’t think I could be happy with that even if I answered the question “Can I train honorably for a race and then run that race as hard as I can?” in the affirmative.

At a certain pace point, the whole game of testing myself in this way strikes me as feeble, pitiful, and embarrassing. Maybe every one-time or waning competitive runner has one. I was okay with five-minute pace (close to a fast jog for a world-class runner) being roughly my race pace for short to-medium-long road distances. But six-minute pace? What am I now, a 14-year-old girl missing a leg who just lost two liters of blood? Et cetera.

But ego might not be responsible for most or even much of my reluctance to test myself despite being generally healthy and apparently not “vaccine”-injured. I think essential despair is the main driver there. Despair is why I no longer form longer-term goals in “important” areas, never mind jogging-wankery, and am skating along doing just enough to feed and house myself and a dog until neither of us requires either luxury. If I actually cared about my running fitness while caring about almost nothing else, this would be more pathological than being equally listless about both.

In the past, my morose periods were always padded with at least a vague sense that everything would work out somehow, for myself and “the world,” and that I would ultimately settle into some kind of low-static purpose with a reasonable yield. That’s no longer true, and were I to put forth effort in a way that by definition invites self-judgment, I would quickly find myself even more nihilistic. I can’t besmirch my enjoyment of jogging around with my dog, or even alone, by pretending any of that matters beyond how I am spending my time and inching reliably closer to finally being out of it.

The only way I will continue to exert genuine effort in any aspect of my life is by pretending that I’m not trying hard at anything. I like to move around for what it gives me, but more often than not would have been happy to not end up anywhere once I have stopped. But I think the fixed-pace-to-failure run, which is not unlike a VO2 Max treadmill test, is both a useful way to find out how fast you are without running a race (another way to find out how fit you are, incidentally) and a means of reminding yourself of your own resilience, if any. Jumping into a set of short reps is a sly way to re-acquaint yourself with goal-oriented running, but soon just leads to the second kind of workout anyway, so you might as well skip ahead to that point if you’re serious about racing after a (non-traumatic) break and aren’t just running to take the sting out of whatever time you have left.