Tuesday Sept 16 2008

Creative post title, don’t you think.

Last night I did my first track workout in a while…a set of 800’s with Coach Mike and the TCSD crew. Since I haven’t done any speedwork in over a month, I knew it would be interesting. I was really slow and lethargic to start with. Ran the first in a pedestrian 3 minutes flat which pretty much sucked..but the legs slowly loosened up and I started running more easily after. The last 5 were 2:55, 2:48, 2:39, 2:36, 2:37. Met Karl Bordine…cool guy. He’s a cyclist turned triathlete. The man can ride a bike…he casually mentions that at Oceanside he rode 2:18, only 7 seconds slower than Andy Potts.  Sick fast. We start to chat about bike mileage…he mentions that he typically rides 300-400 miles a week. As John L. Parker would say, The Secret is that there is no secret.

Speaking of Mr. Parker, I just reread “Once A Runner”, his famous novel. If you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it.

A couple of my favorite passages:

“Cassidy sought no euphoric interludes. They came, when they did, quite naturally and he was content to enjoy them privately. He ran not for crypto-religious reasons, but to win races, to cover ground fast. Not only to be better than his fellows, but better than himself. To be faster by a tenth of a second, by an inch, by two feet or two yards than he had been the week or year before. He sought to conquer the physical limitations placed upon him by a three-dimensional world (and if Time is the fourth dimension, that too was his province). If he could conquer the weakness, the cowardice in himself, he would not worry about the rest; it would come. Training was a rite of purification; from it came speed, strength. Racing was a rite of death; from it came knowledge. Such rites demand, if they are to be meaningful at all, a certain amount of time spent precisely on the Red Line, where you can lean over the manicured putting green at the edge of the precipice and see exactly nothing.”

“Running to him was real, the way he did it the realest thing he knew. It was all joy and woe, hard as diamond; it made him weary beyond comprehension. But it also made him free.”

‘Til next time.

~ by JP on September 17, 2008.