I'm gonna be sore on Sunday.


                                

No, I'm not gonna be sore because I'm running the Rock'N'Roll Half Marathon. I'm gonna be sore because I'm NOT running the Rock'N'Roll Half Marathon.

"Lemme 'splain. No - is too much. Lemme sum up" -- Inigo Montoya, "The Princess Bride"

Four months ago, a friend and I ran down into, along, and up out of the Grand Canyon. That was two months after the America's Finest City Half Marathon, in which I had a terrible race.

After that race, my friend Sandy picked the next race, which was to be that silliness going on downtown this weekend (i.e. PF Chang's Rock'N'Roll). So I trained up for the Canyon run, and then started training for this race after the Canyon run.

But, along the way, something happened.

My current workout schedule has two long runs per week - 12 milers on Wednesday and Saturday. I would do the Wednesday run with the first five miles as a warmup, then six miles as a tempo run at AHMP (Anticipated Half Marathon Pace), followed by a one-mile cooldown.

In the first few weeks after the Canyon run, I was doing those six miles in 7:45-7:50 pace, or so. I could live with that. Just a few years ago, I ran all of my half marathons at 6:25-6:40 pace, but I've gotten slower since then - my last two have been right around 8:00 pace, and I wanted to break through that and get back down into the 7:XX range.

Then my paces started to slow down - not only that, but I was holding those slower paces for fewer miles. It got to where, instead of 6 miles at 7:45, I was doing 5 or 4.5 at 8:20 or 8:30 pace.

After a while, I quit attempting those tempo runs. Nowadays my 12 milers are at more like 9:30 pace, and I have no idea why. I just kept getting slower; I kept doing the same mileage, I kept doing two long runs/week, but I also kept slowing down.

There's a "rule of thumb" that, as you get older, you lose something like 1% of your race speed per year. This is more along the lines of a loss of 20% of my speed in three months. That's just not aging gracefully at all : )

So I decided some time last week that I was not going to go down to run the Rock'N'Roll Half Marathon.

It doesn't make any sense to do so. It doesn't make sense from a "just complete the distance" perspective; I already know that I can run 13.1 miles. Running 12 miles twice a week, and having completed a good many half marathons before, I feel comfortable and secure in that statement. I could finish the race.

But it's not an event - it's a RACE, so I'm supposed to go down there and run it fast. And I just ain't gonna be able to run it fast. In fact, I can't even run it at a pace that I would call fast now  - heck, I can't even run it my new SLOW.

And let's face it - I really, really don't need one more half-marathon T-shirt : )

So it would be an ordeal of going to downtown Phoenix (I only go to downtown Phoenix once a year - for the GoDaddy Holiday Party) and standing around in the cold for a couple of hours and then running on streets with 20,000 other people at a pace so slow that it makes me wanna take up knitting. Then, at the end, I'll get to be cold and stiff and uncomfortable until I can find my wife in the middle of 50,000 or so strangers, so that she can take me home and put me in a hot tub so that I can forget about the whole thing.

Why go through all of that? I can already forget about it NOW, without any of that trouble :)

I had one fellow who suggested that, since I'd already paid for the race, that I should go ahead and do it anyway. That, to me, feels like throwing away a perfectly good Sunday after some already spent bad money. If I had already paid for a root canal, and then lost the tooth, would I go on down to the dentists office anyway, just because I wanted him to run the drill on me for a couple of hours?

So I'm not gonna run that race. And, having decided that, it's time to get on with the next thing, which is trying to get back into shape from a strength perspective.

I almost benched 300 lbs almost four years ago; it's been sitting out there waiting on me every since, but I've been wasting my time preoccupied with trying to get back into running shape instead.

(editor's note: when I say "I almost benched 300", here's what I mean - back in July of 2005, I had 300 on the bar on the Smith rack at my gym. I dropped it down and pushed it back up, and then hooted and hollered - until I realized that I hadn't touched the bar to my chest. So I didn't actually bench 300 - a week later, I was 10 pounds weaker, and benching 295. Now I'm way back down around, oh, 260 or so, although I haven't maxed out in a while).

So, now that I'm going to try to get back into lifting shape, I have to do deadlifts and squats. And you can't do deadlifts and squats without actually DOING deadlifts and squats - even though you know that it's going to hurt. And it's really going to hurt those first few times.

So, this morning, I did two sets of each - low weight, high reps, but that won't stop the DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness) from hitting me on Sunday morning. I'll actually be able to do anything that I can do right now - I won't even be particularly tired - but it will hurt like heck to move my legs. I would probably be able to do a ten mile run on Sunday, but it would hurt the whole time : )

I've told Ethel to go ahead and figure out some sort of activity to get me out of the house and keep me distracted on Sunday, otherwise I'll just sit in my chair and moan : )