The small muscle spasms of post Victoria Marathon soreness seem to signify a good time for a long-overdue blog update. Granted, on this morning after, I am not as sore as I could be, though I certainly felt green for two or three hours post-race while a nasty cocktail of sugary/ cola drinks, too much caffeine and ibuprofen filtered through my liver and kidneys.
Training for the Victoria marathon began mid-August, following an anti-climactic end to a cycling season in which a broken chain preceded an unceremonious withdrawal from my last important race of the season, the Provincial Road race in Abbotsford. A couple of relatively weak Tuesday night time-trials in Sidney was all the body could muster in two weeks that followed, though the placings there bolstered a minor upside to my season finale by preserving a 5th place overall in the Victoria Cycling League ‘A’ standings, a weekly series of local club races that begins in March and ends in September.
To linger for a moment on the summer’s cycling events, the highlight was probably the White Rock Criterium in July, in which fitness acquired from the Mt Hood 5-stage race in June began finally to emerge, and, by the criterium finish I began to believe I still belonged in an elite level bicycle race, though perhaps not the same could have been said about the road race the next day.
Overall my cycling season was not as long and generally weaker than 2008, but perhaps a commitment to a role in a Victoria Shakespeare Society production of Julias Caesar and twelve performances beginning early July, and ending mid-August, flattened slightly my peaking capacity on the bike. For this I am not complaining, as the acting experience was rich and wonderful, and I see more of that in the cards in years to come.
To be sure, while the motivation remains to train and be competitive as a cyclist (and as a runner), there is a marked, inexorable shift in motivations that greets the advent of my fifth decade and gently nudges the expenditure of my energies in alternative directions. I feel it stronger now than I did during the last decade of life, but still the call is also strong from every bodily cell to be invigorated by intense activity. But this beckoning is now more firmly pulled against a set of intellectual and artistic imperatives that drive my energies too, the agents of which at either end are not inconsistent in principle, but which heighten the tension that sends me on my way through the dynamical dancing landscape of my life, as it does all of us to varying degrees. Of course amid that tension is the greatest responsibility we bear to our fellow human beings, the constancy of which is sometimes the hardest work we bear, at least it so often seems to me.
I have vastly digressed! But what could a post that comes three months after the last one be but one that begins from the philosophical perspective, shifts to a general descriptive overview (perhaps vice-versa in this case), but ends finally on specificities. The marathon!
My training went well, having discovered double tempo workouts once a week that culminated in one day a couple of weeks ago when I did two 10 mile tempo runs within a few hours and about 40km on the day. With a longer lead up to the event, I can see how such sessions can result in yet greater fitness.
In the weeks leading up to the race I had in mind that 2:36 was reasonable, and initially I had thought it was possible for me to shoot for the top Master time, for which some prize money was on the line. But when I had heard that Danny Gonzalez, from Oregon, was here, whose PB is 2:13 (albeit set probably 20 years ago), it seemed my chances at that were slim.
On the cold but sunny and nearly windless morning, I found it a tough day out there. While my pace was about where I had hoped through ten miles, in 58 somthing, I found the energy gradually waning through to the half, at 1:17.58. While I have had greater mental struggles to pull myself to the finish, I was surprised at how hard I was breathing at points over the second half – glad that I was able to breathe that hard and not blow completely, but somewhat chagrinned that such an effort did not result in faster leg turnover.
In the end I was not far down on the second Master, from Tokyo, whose time was 2:36, and not as far back from Gonazalez as I might have thought, who was in at 2:33. I was happy with being the third Master and 12th overall among a very strong field, with non-Canadians taking 8 of the places ahead of me.
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