Ruing the loss of the gap
By the time I left high school, while I was far from a superstar runner, I had managed to rack up two runner-up finishes and a third at state-championship-level meets, run 9:43 a couple of times for 3,200 meters, and record a 15:57 in a certified 5K road race two weeks before I graduated.
My first-ever race of any sort, run in September 1984 as a scared-shitless ninth-grader on the Concord High home course at White Park, was a 21:06 5K. By the end of the season I ran 19:31 on the same course, and the next spring I broke the Rundlett Junior High School record with a 4:55 or 4:56 1,600 meters. (There's a funny story about that record that I will defer telling, probably forever, because it's not really that funny.)
One thing that strikes me about running in my prep years is that there was a major mental and functional gap between the times I put forth in training and what I was able to do on the race course.
For the most part, I didn't even care about my pace unless I was doing intervals or racing. For example, I topped out at 60 or 65 miles a week in the summer before my senior year, but almost never paid attention to my pace on training runs, and even when I did I did nothing with the information. I ran mostly very hilly routes in the northeastern part of Concord, N.H. and the adjoining town of Canterbury, and I think it was rare for me to average under 7:00 pace for a run of any length unless I pushed at least a little.
I did set aside one special run, the Boyce Road loop, every summer as a fitness check, usually in early August. Back then, with no GPS devices to go by, I and others typically relied on car odometers to measure courses -- fine for everyday purposes but not so great when you really wanted to know how long a course was within 50 meters tops. I knew the Boyce Road loop was "about 2.4 miles" -- something I later confirmed when I wheeled it off at 3.840 km, equal to exactly 2.4 "miles" where a "mile" in quotation marks is 1600 meters. In August 1987 I ran this loop in 12:24, which works out to 5:11.8 pace -- consistent with having run a 4th of July 5K the month before in 16:14, or 5:13.5 pace.
What I am doing a crappy job of getting at in my meandering and reminiscing here is that while I was capable of stringing together a couple of 4:50-ish miles on a track and three under 5:10 pace on the road, it was unusual for me to approach such paces in practice for more than about 1,000 meters at a pop. The summer before my senior year, the same summer I ran 27:24 in a hilly 5-miler (the Bill Luti race, which still exists) and 16:14 for 5K along with that 12:24 2.387-mile time trial, I did a spontaneous two-mile pick-up on the now-long-defunct Fred Hackett 10K course, which passed within about 330 meters of my house. I ran from the 2-mile mark to the 4-mile mark, a segment that is neither forgiving nor brutal, and about killed myself to run, I believe, 11:30-ish. It was very rare for me to run under 6:00 pace for very long unless I had a number on my chest or hip.
This all changed once I got to college, but my college "career" was both short and ugly, so it wasn't until I started racing marathons in my mid-twenties that my times in workouts started to approach my times in races that were not all that much longer than the workout.
This is to be expected in meaningful marathon training, of course. You can't, for example, expect to go out and do 20-milers at 8:00 pace and repeat 800s in 2:50 and expect to break three hours for 26.21875 miles unless you're talented to begin with; specificity is critical for both mental and physiological reasons. So, in September 1999, three weeks before maybe my third serious attempt to break 2:30:00, I ran 30K on a track at 5:37 pace (almost all of it with my yellow Lab Komen, another story for another day or none at all). I raced the marathon at 5:36 pace. For a long time, I also had a 15K "personal record" set on a track in 1997 -- 48:28, with splits of 16:22, 16:08 and 15:58.
As much as it is the sign of a mature distance runner to to be able "bring it" on demand in this manner (within limits, and being careful not to race workouts, yada yada yada), I admit to missing the idea of race-day magic -- the quixotic notion that it's possible to outdo your own limits on race day thanks to a combination of previously untapped emotion and raw grit. It's a macho-romantic notion and not very rational when you get right to it, but it sure is appealing.