I have seen a number of posts in the media about running the past two weeks. Two things seem to stand out to me when reading over the comments. A number of the posts show the progression of times and distances over a period of years. The early years are the shorter distance races like 5K’s, 10K’s and slow times. As the years progressed the times seemed to get faster and faster. It would seem as a runner gets older the times would get slower. The training times often remained the same but the race times kept getting faster.
Having gone through similar sequences in running it seems that the actual running in a race plays a critical part in faster running. A friend and I lifted weights and then ran a mile after the workout. We thought we were doing good running that mile. One day we decided to try a three mile run. At the halfway point my partner needed to retie his shoe. That slow retying of the shoe for five minutes was one of the reasons we completed the three-mile run. Then in 1979 the first Capital 10K was held. Another friend was asking me to join him. Having a hard time with three miles, I was not enthused about running over six miles. The cutoff for entering was a week before the race. My excuse was, “Oh, I forgot to enter in time, so I can’t run with you.” He talked to my wife and she entered us both in the race. My claim to fame in that first race was I beat the 54 minute cut off time to get a t-shirt and I beat some 12-year-old youngsters by 10 seconds.
Over the years, my 10K time eventually dropped down to 38 minutes. And that same friend wanted to run a marathon. Again, knowing how hard that 10K distance was, I declined. The point was that we ran together, and I went on his increased mileage runs. The long distance was not as imposing as in the original thinking. After he ran his marathon, I entered the Houston Tenneco marathon to give it a try. My goal was to break four hours. I made it in 15 minutes. I was hooked on running marathons. I eventually ran 16 marathons and dropped my finish time down to 3:04. That was good enough to qualify for the Boston Marathon. The thought back then was if you ran fast enough to qualify you have to run the Boston Marathon. I entered with the thought of running for fun and enjoyed the fact that I was running in the Boston Marathon. And I ran under 3:30 and enjoyed the run and the excitement of the crowd along the way.
