That Nearly Killed Me...

Before yesterday, I hadn't really run since the Sporting Life 10K two weeks previous.

I kept active over those two weeks with rugby, Crossfit workouts and cycling. But no running.

Yesterday, I wanted to go for a longer run. The route I'd mapped out was 12.685K and involved running through the valley at York Mills and Yonge twice. Rob was back from his trip to Spain, so he joined me for a run for the first time in four weeks.

Since I hadn't run that far in a while, I wanted this run to be at a relatively easy pace. Also, the plan was that Rob and I would run a hard 5K the next morning -- one where he would set the pace for me to push my record for the 5K -- and I didn't want to destroy myself before that.

I'd forgotten how much faster Rob runs than I do, and how much that would cause me to misjudge my pacing. I was hoping to run the distance at around a 6:15/K pace -- a reasonably easy pace given the hills. I finished the run in around an hour and fifteen minutes -- around a 5:55/K pace, or nearly a total of five minutes faster than my goal for the run -- and feeling a hell of a lot more gassed than I would have liked.

This morning, I was in Kitchener. We were at Rob's dad's house. Rob had been my ride out to a party in Oakville yesterday afternoon, and I agreed to tag along afterwards so that he could drive straight to Kitchener afterwards to visit his dad (gas prices, you know).

I wasn't really feeling it. There wasn't any soreness from yesterday's run, but I was tired from the drinking last night, the lack of sleep, and kind of wheezy due to slight allergies to Rob's dad's cat. We were running regardless, yet, when Rob asked me whether I wanted to do a comfortable 5K, or a speed 5K, some masochistic element in the depths of my brain made me answer that I wanted to push for speed.

I thought I might be in trouble when I started gasping for air within the first two-hundred meters of the run. Since I was in completely unfamiliar territory, I had no way to gauge my pace. Rob said he was setting the pace for a twenty-five minute 5K (more than a minute faster than my record) and I just tried to keep up. My heart-rate was averaging 185 BPM. I started feeling the onset of a stitch about 2K in -- right around the point when Rob checked our time and told me that we were running a little faster than the twenty-five minute pace. Great. I managed to stave off the stitch by watching my breathing, but I forced myself to keep running as fast as I thought was reasonable. Around twenty-minutes in I was gassed, but I knew we still had a kilometer to go. I just kept going, but my legs were starting to feel like lead.

A few minutes later (though, it seemed a lot longer) Rob tried to motivate me to speed up by telling me we only had three-hundred meters to go. The stitch had fully set in at that point, but I kept running. At the end of that three-hundred meters, Rob told me it was still another hundred meters. If I'd had the energy, I would have strangled him. He tried to cajole some last bit of speed out of me, but I had no energy left. There was no "kick". My heart-rate was at 192 BPM. He kept telling me to "give it all I had". I would have told him that I was already doing that, if I had been able to gasp out any words at that point. I ran that last stretch as fast as I could before stumbling to a stop, bending over and dry-heaving.

I felt like absolute crap, but I'd just finished the run in 25:46 -- forty-three seconds better than any 5K I'd run on my flat route I run around North York, and thirteen seconds better than my 5K split time on the down-hill Sporting Life 10K route.

That's not bad for not having run in two weeks.

I'm hoping, some day, I'll be at a point where I think a 25:46 5K run is a 'comfortable' run.

But, this morning, I thought I was going to die.