June 18, 2005
1:01:43/164
Nathalie had a meeting to go to at 10 am, and I had to drop Tim off for school at 8:30 am, so I decided not to run long today.
Ran 14.7 km (9.1 mi) as three laps around Pontcharra with two drink breaks. Started at a relatively good pace and picked it up for the third lap ending flat out. If I remember correctly, my split after drinking the second time was 42:34. That would mean I ran the last 4.9 km (3 mi) in 19:07. No headache.
It would be nice to get efficient enough to run the first two laps at that pace, then pick it up and run the third in 17 minutes.
Most of the time this morning I worked on the feeling of steel and cotton, which is keeping your core straight and letting everything pivot around that as necessary. Even before reading Chi Running, I realized that running a long way fast comes not from power, but from smoothness and focus. Matt talks about "caning it." I guess that comes from the jockey, which is you, beating the horse's hindquarters, which is your body, with a cane to get the animal going as fast as possible. Perhaps that's the right approach to cycling. I don't know.
It's not the right approach to distance running. In distance running as I see it, you become a sort of control system for your body. To a large extent you're there only unconsciously firing the spark plugs that keep the engine turning over. People running slowly and well under their thresholds can then do a lot of thinking while they're running because the part of you that is conscious is not very involved. Yet when you focus, your consciousness switches over to monitor, test, adjust.
There's always more to monitor, test, and adjust than my consciousness can handle. At medium speed, my consciousness can more or less keep up, however. At high enough speed I lose it again and just run. My consciousness is not longer doing much more than fighting to keep the drum beating fast, to hold the tempo, to convince the whole body not to slow down. I cannot run like that for very long. My hope is that by short exposures to that sort of running, my body itself will gradually get better at finding the right adjustments, so medium speed will be slightly faster. Then my consciousness can get back to monitor, test, adjust, improving my form.
Posted by Mark at June 18, 2005 10:23 AM