transition

These last 10 days I've been giving a lot of thought to changing the direction of my running.  The funny part is that my running hasn't really had any direction or plan at all in several years.  It's basically just been adding miles to my running blog and some occasional events. 

Misty, Sam and I ran the Lampasas 10k Saturday the 24th and since then I haven't been able to stop thinking about the possibility of running fast (that's a very relative term) again.  I ran a 1:05 without any specific training.  Just my usual lackadaisical running.  For the hell of it I checked the '18 Cap10k results to see what percentage I would have finished in.  Boy was I surprised to find out I would have been in the top 40% of finishers.  And realistically I would have been higher than that because I surely would have been at least a few minutes faster in April vs. the middle of July!

So, I've been mulling this over the past 10 days and I'm pretty sure I'm going to try an experiment.  I'm going to try to get some speed back.  I was faster than most all of my peers growing up.  The first time I ran anything like distance was the 3 mile run as part of the PFT in Marine Corps bootcamp.  I was always near the front of those runs too.  I ran two 18:40's and an 18:30 in the three tests we had.  In the summer of '82 I ran a 3 mile in 17:30.

Flash forward to '86-'87.  I began a running program then that culminated in a 41:05 10k and a 1:42 half marathon.

Another running flashback is from '89.  I was 29 living in the wilderness camp working with the teenage boys.  They were 15, 16, 17 years old and I could still out run most of them in something resembling a 40 yard dash!!

Fast forward to June '98 and I begin running again to help me quit smoking and 8 months later ran a 3:42 marathon!  I remember having a conscious thought about not wanting to put in the work to get any faster.  I wanted to go long.  I'd wanted to go long since I was a teenage and now I had my chance.  I joined a loose knit club that ran a marathon a month for a year and met some lifelong friends along the way.

There are many factors involved in my thoughts about shifting my running focus.  I sprained my right ankle really bad at the Pandora's Box of Rox Marathon.  80 days later it's still not right.  That was my good ankle too.  Running shorter and faster would actually be much less stressful.  I've been managing a neuroma in my right foot for 18 years, mostly successfully, but it's been quite a challenge.  A couple of years ago I started having a problem with burning in my feet when I get up near marathon distance in long runs.  I've rolled my left ankle very badly at least three times over the years and can't tell you how many times I've fallen down on the trail.  The thought of getting out on a trail now almost makes me fearful.

Switching to much shorter races and roads removes all these obstacles.

This is definitely not going to be an easy transition though.  It's actually going to be very painful.  I haven't pushed any speed in so many years.  The 7 mile Thursday morning tempo runs could be quite painful at times but I'll be needing to do that regularly again plus add in shorter repeats.  And, I'll need to do a lot of strengthening/ core stuff too.

All that being said I'm very excited about having a new focus.  I started out fast, went long and fairly fast to slow and long and now attempting to get back to relatively fast......why not!! There hasn't been any excitement at all regarding my running in a very long time.....