10. Toddler's Dream

After the dune experience, I knew there was no way back, nor a second chance either.  With that in mind and soul, I began to move on to the next phase, whatever that phase was, as I had close to no idea. I felt like a toddler who’d just learned his first steps and started to prance around happily. However, learning the walk-run-fly routine required a more serious plan. 


And so I began to read about running. There is tons of material on the net and I selected what made most sense to me. No BS-ing blogs of people with far too much free time, but professional ones. My first reaction was that my wife was right, not only “always-right” right but also on this particular topic: half of the lectures were about stretching. I couldn’t imagine how many ways to elongate your muscles there are and how painful they seem even by looking at the pictures. But they played a crucial role in the preparation, capturing my wife’s attention being by far the most important. “You see, I’ve told you! If you want, I can show you how to do it. Correctly, Flo, not like you fold your t-shirts”


You read about a lot of stuff there. Good stuff. I found out about the RPE (Rate of Perceived Exertion, basically how deadly you perceive the effort) and how to use your talking as an instrument to measure it. That’s my turf, baby, give me that!, I’ve always felt that talking is nicer and easier than working. That RPE was used to introduce something that almost made me think of sticking exclusively to biking: interval training, surges, tempo, fartleks (how that Swedish word made it to the English speaking community is still a puzzle to me: a fart lek is the last thing you want when running). They all say about the same: alternate running like crazy with relaxing moments. To me, they represented two things that I hated (still do to this day, but I’m slightly wiser now): the idea of training and getting exhausted. I had just managed to take some delight in running and now, bang!, you need to train, run fast (never been a fast player in any sport), god knows what comes next. 


But, you know, there’s a moment when you have to beat your comfort zone and at least smell the sprouts before you spit them out. This being said, on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, I decided to go for it. Sure, my wife told the story already, as objectively as God himself herself, but let me cast my own humble light to it as well. 


    First of all, there’s no need for me to be abducted: I get lost very well all by myself, in the most creative and unexpected ways. The fact that I am married to someone with a built-in GPS, which gets updated every new city trip, doesn’t help me at all to improve on it. When I was younger I used to (timidly) rebel about the itineraries in new cities (“Come on, why do we always need a map, let’s just wander around the streets”).


After we spent a full morning ducking and stooping below the same scaffolding on a narrow street in London, under my mighty mapless guidance, invariably circling around the statue of Wellington, a few times even, also carrying a pram, I forever capitulated and stopped making noise. I could not but admit that I am a bad compass. And that’s when I focus. When I don’t and my thoughts are roaming away…


Back to running now, on that special day when I decided to break the spell and go faaaaast. All right, I might have talked about it a bit too much, to whomever was there to listen to me (ahem, Colin had long left the building, so there was only one victim). 


Anyway, let me start with the lesson learned from that day: do not mix stuff (“listen to the woman” had long been assimilated by then!). It’s, if you want, similar to the situation when you get stopped by a police agent for speeding and he would, of course, give you a fine and tell you how dangerously you were driving and how you should behave in traffic and so on and so forth. And then, if you want to keep the balance in the universe, tell him that he should either give you a fine or a lesson, but not both, thank you very much!

Now, when you’re out to run faaast (especially the first time), pick the beaten path, don’t be an explorer. Don’t go through woods and places you’ve never been before. Well, at that time I hadn’t read my blog, so I didn’t know the right way. Before I realised, I ended up on some paths no wider than my foot and my running looked more like a catwalk display. After the first five km, when I checked my pace, it was an embarrassing one. So much for my faaaast track. How could I go back home with this? However, adaptive species are the ones surviving, so I decided to change the tactic on the fly and go long. Which I did, only that I didn’t know the new route that well (surprise!) and I couldn’t say how long it would be (it was 14km in the end). But, since I had time to think, I recapped what the running programs said about running long distances: that you should be able to talk comfortably. So I called my wife to ask her how I was doing it. And that I was not kidnapped. She was puzzled at first, but she read the situation quickly and knew that the explanation would take longer than the race, so she didn't insist any further.

That had been my longest run by then. In all honesty, it felt fantastic. I was really looking forward to the new ones and it became clear where my heart and my comfort were: more and more at longer distances. But, if you want to make any progress, you should follow a better schedule, in which you insert some pain trips between the pleasure runs. 

The real good news was that, in September, the High Tech Campus run would still take place for 5k, 10k, 15k. I thought about going for 10k and I began using a running app to help me train properly for that in the coming two months. 

The running app took some data from me, crunched a few numbers and spat out a long laundry list of running sessions. Short, long, fast, slow, the whole enchilada. Still, the best part - and by distance -  was the super sexy voice that’s guiding you through the whole run. How could you not go (like) crazy when you hear someone almost teasing you, rolling her tongue and introducing now and then a not-at-all mute h between the letters: “Kheep your pace … bhetween fhive ...twenty five … and fhive ...fhorty five minutes per khilometre … fhor one minute”. Speaking of personal bests, sometimes she’s asking for 2 minutes. Just don’t panic, they say. 

The cherry on the cake is at the end of it. The pre-cherry starts with “Cool dhoooown. Kheep your pace …”, only to finish in style with a full plump one “Whorkout complete...”. The satisfying feeling that you’ve done a good job is priceless. Awesome tool. The only improvement I can see is to have the “it happens to everyone” consolation talk in case that it’s difficult to keep up with the requirements, but I can live without that add-on. 


The encouraging thing about a training plan starting from zero is that in the beginning you reach a few milestones and achieve several personal records. There’s no history to beat and practically every new run brings something new, be it on distance or speed. You get to feel like a king, somehow. Of Liechtenstein, indeed, but still a king.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Mother of Inventions. And More

Memories

Beer To Our Heart's Content