As an endurance athlete, remember what it was like—from an energetic standpoint—to be in your late 20s: the feeling that, no matter how much you trained—it was almost impossible to wear yourself out? For me, that was the era of running marathons, training 80-100 mile weeks beforehand and still feeling eager to train more. During those years, it seemed, I couldn’t arrive at a flight of stairs without yielding to the urge to charge up two stairs at a time. My best marathon time—2:44 at the NYC marathon in 1978—came one week after having run another marathon.
That’s why, as I pondered how best to taper for this year’s Spring Fling, it occurred to me that I didn’t run a single step before that personal best back in ‘78. I went for a leisurely spin on a bike a time or two, but I didn’t run. Any loss of conditioning was more than offset by a supply of energy so generous that I remember charging home the last ten miles with zero concern about running out of gas.
So this year, I decided to experiment with being totally rested—so rested that I would be practically exploding with the need for intense exertion. As a result, here’s what I did: Nine days before the Fling I did a 2 and ¼ hour ski at our local ski area, one that features lots of hills. This was the day after an intense one-hour workout preceded by three hours of shoveling snow from our roof. Needless to say, I was wiped. I felt no urge whatsoever to train for the next two days. During the remainder of the week I took some more days off and trained only enough to prevent going into acute exercise deprivation and not being able to sleep. Energetically, in other words, I felt like my 28-year-old self.
Needless to say, I’ve never arrived at a race so ready to crank and so determined not to revisit the oh-so-familiar precincts of Bonkville. The pent-up ya-yas notwithstanding, my strategy was simple: go easy the first 15K, pick it up a bit over the next 7K—to the top of Ruthie’s Run—and then hammer home the final 8K. I had another objective as well: to relish each stride rather than worry about where I was in relation to others. Remembering all the years I’d faded with a few K to go, I kept my warmup to an absolute minimum: 10 minutes. When the race started, I refused to get caught up in the general frenzy, kept my poles in one piece, and just went with the flow.
I soon found myself in a train with the Harvard women’s team plus Cheryl Carlson. “Hey, I’m not proud!” I thought to myself and enjoyed slowly moving up through the train until at the top of Ruthie’s it was just me and Cheryl. Having skied the course a month or so beforehand, I knew the ensuing gradual downhill was the place to snarf a GU, which I’d ripped open before the race, and take some fluid—not on the flats at the soccer field feed station. I finally went by Cheryl during a long downhill stretch on Sam’s Run, then let her pull me up that huge hill at 2K. She V-1’d up most of the hill while I economized on the energy output and single-sticked. When we arrived at the soccer field, Cheryl stopped to feed while I kept going. She never caught up.
The remainder of the race consisted of taking turns drafting with a 46-year-old Spaniard living in NJ who’d done the Birkie the week before. True to my game plan, I put down the hammer with 8K to go, but the Spaniard tucked in behind and stayed with me. What a relief to experience zero arm fatigue as we zoomed down Sam’s Run. When I found I couldn’t shake the Spaniard, we took turns drafting. Heading up the final big uphill, I felt terrific and attacked using only a V-1 this time, but he was simply stronger and gapped me. I finished strong—too strong in retrospect, with a time nearly identical with last year’s.
But what a difference in the actual experience: pure enjoyment from start to finish and fun chats with Cheryl and the Spaniard afterwards. That said, I’m looking forward to this weekend’s 15K skate and the opportunity to go hard all the way without concern over evading the dreaded bonk.
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