I've been obsessing over a minute for a three days now.
Last Saturday I ran the Weston Fest 5k, and let me say at the start that it was a great race. It was cheap — $10 with T-shirt, $5 without. (I took the shirt; it says "Village of Weston" on the back, and I'm starting to collect items of clothing that have a sense of place with them). It had a great course that included the Birch Street bike/pedestrian bridge over Highway 29. (All bike/ped bridges are just cool and a car honked encouragingly when my fellow competitors were crossing it.) And it had a nice field of runners, about 200 or so, I reckon, athletes of all ages. (Including most of the members of the D.C. Everest High School cross country team, who trounced everybody, I think. Shouldn't the WIAA do something about that?)
The race started and ended at Kennedy Park, and I knew the course had a good, long hill, the one going south on Birch Street heading toward Ministry Saint Clare's Hospital. So my plan was to run even and steady up the hill, then push hard on the downhill stretch past Everest High to the finish.
It was good plan, and it worked great. I ran the first mile in nine minutes and felt good about that. (I realize that nine-minute miles are a very pedestrian pace for most runners. But it's brisk for me, and besides the numbers really don't matter. It's all about the spirit behind the numbers.)
I felt strong throughout the race, especially going up the hill. Strong and steady, just like I had planned. I got a bit gassed on the downhill, but hey, I thought it's OK. With about a half mile to go, and the finish in sight, I looked at my watch. It said 27 minutes.
What?! How could that be? I knew the race was over. My goal was to beat 27:30, my time from the last 5k I ran, a few weeks ago in Moorhead, MN. I had biked about 60 miles before that race, and it was hot and humid. I struggled throughout the whole three miles, and the only thing that saved me was that Moorhead is not as flat as a pancake, but flatter.
So everything about the Weston race pointed to a good time. Not a top three time, not a winning time, but a good time for me, who I am, what I am and where I am in my life and fitness level. So when I saw that 27 minutes, everything just deflated and while I pushed to the end, my heart wasn't in it. A girl, she looked like she was about 12, and her dad both outsprinted me at the finish.
I ended up with a time of 28:32. I know it's only 20 seconds per mile or so slower than the Moorhead race. So what's the big deal?
The big deal is that I had birthday between the races. The big deal is that I still believe I can run a 5k in 21 minutes or so, like I used to when I was in high school. I know, I know. It doesn't really make any sense, but it's there anyway. I'm 46 years old now, and I'm facing the inevitability that I won't be able to improve my times at all, that I'll just have to accept the reality of aging and humanity and life, and know that my times will decline.
So it's not just about the 20 seconds per mile. It's about being 46 years old and realizing that life is finite, and that there are many more things to come that will be slower, or the last or whatever.
My running career -- yeah, I'm calling it that -- isn't anywhere near over. It's been punctuated by a lot more losses than victories, and always, always, I toe another starting line and keep on running. This won't be any different. I hope to run until I'm 90. I'll find new ways to find meaning and joy from running and biking and competing in races.
And maybe I'll run a 5k in 21 minutes again, sometime.
Tuesday, July 24, 2012
Monday, July 16, 2012
Fargo
I love the Coen Brothers, but the movie "Fargo" certainly does not do justice to the real town. "Fargo", of course, is about a bunch of slow talking Minnesotans who pepper their conversations with a "Ya sure" a lot.
The real Fargo is in North Dakota, and the people there talk nothing like Twin City suburbanites. They sound more like the cowboys from "Lonesome Dove" than they do the characters of the Coen Brothers movie.
OK. So they took some artistic license with the naming of the movie. After all, would a movie called "Eden Prairie" have the same cache?
But my real problem is that the movie leaves the impression that the real city is a boring, middle-of-nowhere place. Fargo IS a middle of nowhere place, and that's what makes it cool. But after two long weekends of visiting the town, I think it's everything but boring.
The fact that is is surrounded by a flat-as-a-pancake prairie, with no other major city to be found within 100 miles, naturally makes Fargo interesting. There is a great minor league baseball team, some terrific stores, a nifty little museum devoted to baseball great Roger Maris, who grew up in Fargo.
Really, Fargo is the northern gateway to the west, and that in itself makes it cool. The guys wear cowboys shirts, the girls walk around downtown in flowing dresses. There are pickup trucks and motorcycles and hot sports cars. Oh, and there are a lot of trains running through there.
Moorhead, Fargo's little Minnesota sister, has a great Scandinavian heritage center, the Hjemkomst Center. I had my first (and last) meal of lutefisk there. Hjemkomst, by the way, means homecoming in Norwegian.
But the best surprise for me is how great Fargo is its bicycling. There are bike lanes everywhere, and the street systems made up of a numbered streets and avenues make it easy to find your way around. There are great paved biking paths weaving through a bunch of nice parks, and the Red River running its meandering way north makes it all interesting.
I stayed at the Super 8 on the south end of Moorhead, and used my bike to get just about everywhere. But I also took a couple of long bike rides out into the country, and the prairie roads make riding interesting. On a 60-mile loop, I found the flatness and the fields and loneliness awesome. For the first hour. Then I realized that nothing much was changing. I was tapping out a decent tempo, never shifting up or down, never having to think about much of anything at all. It was at once cool and disconcerting at the same time -- there was a distinct sensation that despite all the work being put in, I wasn't moving at all. I found myself looking at my computer a lot, just to make sure I was making headway.
I also went for a nice 6-mile out-and-back run, heading south out of Moorhead. I ended up on a gravel road that ran between a cornfield on one side, soybeans on another. No cars, no people, just me and plants and an occasional blackbird. The vistas were amazing, and sky was everywhere. Such a cool sensation of the open spaces, so different from running and biking in hilly, green and woodsy Marathon County.
The real Fargo is in North Dakota, and the people there talk nothing like Twin City suburbanites. They sound more like the cowboys from "Lonesome Dove" than they do the characters of the Coen Brothers movie.
OK. So they took some artistic license with the naming of the movie. After all, would a movie called "Eden Prairie" have the same cache?
But my real problem is that the movie leaves the impression that the real city is a boring, middle-of-nowhere place. Fargo IS a middle of nowhere place, and that's what makes it cool. But after two long weekends of visiting the town, I think it's everything but boring.
The fact that is is surrounded by a flat-as-a-pancake prairie, with no other major city to be found within 100 miles, naturally makes Fargo interesting. There is a great minor league baseball team, some terrific stores, a nifty little museum devoted to baseball great Roger Maris, who grew up in Fargo.
Really, Fargo is the northern gateway to the west, and that in itself makes it cool. The guys wear cowboys shirts, the girls walk around downtown in flowing dresses. There are pickup trucks and motorcycles and hot sports cars. Oh, and there are a lot of trains running through there.
Moorhead, Fargo's little Minnesota sister, has a great Scandinavian heritage center, the Hjemkomst Center. I had my first (and last) meal of lutefisk there. Hjemkomst, by the way, means homecoming in Norwegian.
But the best surprise for me is how great Fargo is its bicycling. There are bike lanes everywhere, and the street systems made up of a numbered streets and avenues make it easy to find your way around. There are great paved biking paths weaving through a bunch of nice parks, and the Red River running its meandering way north makes it all interesting.
I stayed at the Super 8 on the south end of Moorhead, and used my bike to get just about everywhere. But I also took a couple of long bike rides out into the country, and the prairie roads make riding interesting. On a 60-mile loop, I found the flatness and the fields and loneliness awesome. For the first hour. Then I realized that nothing much was changing. I was tapping out a decent tempo, never shifting up or down, never having to think about much of anything at all. It was at once cool and disconcerting at the same time -- there was a distinct sensation that despite all the work being put in, I wasn't moving at all. I found myself looking at my computer a lot, just to make sure I was making headway.
I also went for a nice 6-mile out-and-back run, heading south out of Moorhead. I ended up on a gravel road that ran between a cornfield on one side, soybeans on another. No cars, no people, just me and plants and an occasional blackbird. The vistas were amazing, and sky was everywhere. Such a cool sensation of the open spaces, so different from running and biking in hilly, green and woodsy Marathon County.
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