This morning was an annual 10K that's a fairly big deal around here. I ran it for the third time. I'm happy with my time, I kept pushing when I wanted to quit and feel like I ran the best time that I'm capable of at the moment, but it frustrates me that my time gets slower every year I run this thing. I've lost about a minute a year. I was thinking about this as I was walking through the rain back to my car. Other than getting older, what is the difference between this year and those other years?
That first year, I was going to the gym and running fairly regularly. I would go during my lunch and run at least one day a week. I may have gone twice some weeks. I would also run on the gym treadmills over the weekend. I had a trip for work that derailed my training right before the race, but I was pretty well prepared. I didn't run all that regularly before last year's race. I can no longer take a couple of hours to go to the gym during lunch, but I was trying to do the March rowing challenge last year. The challenge is to row at least 5000 m for 25 days of March. I missed it by a couple of days when I had to focus on getting some stuff finished for one of my MBA classes in the middle of the month, but all of those meters gave me enough fitness to get through the 10K. School messed up my training again this year. I was up late doing school work enough that I missed quite a few morning workouts. The cold weather kept me inside rather than getting out and running. An injury to my calf just as I was starting to pick up on my training also put me a month behind. I just wasn't as well prepared as I would have liked.
Some of that is circumstances, but I'm sure I could have done more to make sure I got my training in despite work, school, and other obligations. I saw a guy I work with in the starting corral. When I looked up his time, I saw that he beat me by about 5 minutes. We're comparable in size, and he's a few years younger than I am. So why did he get the better time. He runs at lunch almost every day. He's fanatical about it. Cold doesn't stop him. He goes out every day and gets in his miles. He pays a bigger price than I do to improve his fitness. A couple of neighbors beat me by an even bigger margin. Again, they're out there every day putting in the miles. Injury, school, and the weather are just excuses. I could have worked harder to get my body ready to run this year.
If I'm serious about getting in better shape, it's going to take more than one or two workouts a week. I need to be up and running every Monday and Thursday. On days I'm not up running, I need to be up and riding the bike. Saturday needs to be my longer run. Nothing crazy. Maybe an hour of running the neighborhood roads. The weather is turning. I won't be able to use the cold as an excuse for much longer. If I'm serious about wanting to get my 10K time under 50 minutes, I need to do the work to make that happen.
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