Runners are often characterized as being a touch eccentric,
and admittedly, that reputation is sometimes well deserved. For example, just a
few days ago I was preparing to race 10K at the Portland Track Festival and my
thoughts were something along the lines of “it’s only 25 laps, that doesn’t
sound very long, I bet it will go by really fast.” That’s a perfectly sane
perspective, right?
This weekend marked a lot of firsts for me—first outdoor track
race outside the state of Colorado, first 10K on a track, first time getting to
starting line after my usual bedtime. In running, as in life, every new
experience comes with equal measures of potential and risk. It’s exciting to
try something new, to have the opportunity to achieve at a new level; at the
same time, the unfamiliarity of new challenges can sometimes mean that you
don’t get it right the first time and leave unsatisfied. But you have to risk
failure to find out what’s possible…
And so I found myself in the middle of the Portland Track
Festival 10K on Friday night wondering how I deluded myself into thinking that
25 laps would go by quickly—the first few weren’t too bad, but after the
initial early-race excitement wore off, I realized that running 10K on track is
an exercise of persistent focus. It’s not as simple as just setting out at a
certain effort and spacing out for 25 laps; a difference in pace of 1 second
per lap adds up quickly when you’re running 25 of them. Every lap was an
intentional effort to fight for every second, or every tenth of a second, that
I could manage. One thing I didn’t have to focus on was keeping track of my
progress circling the track—between the lap counter (which was great for such
encouraging mid-race thoughts as “great, 5 laps down, only 20 to go”) and the
announcer (who updated entire stadium on our progress every 200m—“they’ve got 8
laps in the bank, they’ll come around 17 more times this evening”), at least I
had that covered.
The end result of this mental and physical battle? The
Portland Track Festival was a fantastic meet, and I was fortunate this weekend
to leave with a feeling that this debut was an overall success. I set a new 10K
PR (in total, this spring I’ve improved my 10K time by over 2 minutes) and even
managed an unofficial PR in the 5K at the halfway mark. Despite this exciting
result, I left feeling that there were a few things I would do differently next
time and that I have room for more improvement in this event. It is this state
of simultaneous satisfaction and dissatisfaction that drives me to keep
training, to constantly push the limits of what I can do. While I am still
waiting to regain normal feeling in my calf muscles (25 laps in spikes—enough
said), I am excited to get back to training and to start chasing new goals, no
matter how distant they seem at first.
