[Note: I wrote this little piece back in August 2006. My post from yesterday put me in mind of it because it also deals with the idea of dependence. FYI: I set my current 5k PB at Lunenburg in 2008.]
I recently broke my 5km PB at a race in Digby, Nova Scotia. There, on the shores of the best scallop fishing grounds in the world, I bettered a personal record that had dogged me for over a year. But the experience was not altogether positive. As I crossed the finish line and glanced up at the clock, I didn’t feel elated as one might expect; instead, I simply felt relieved. Is this the price of running for PBs?
To most runners, a year is not such a long time to carry the same PB. I’ve talked to runners who haven’t smashed a PB in years – and it doesn’t bother them one bit. But I’m a new runner – just a rookie – and (realistically or not) I expect to improve a little with each race.
You see, my first ever 5k (June 2005) turned out to be my fastest 5k until Digby (August 2006). Race after race, I just couldn’t seem to match my first effort. Sometimes it was weather – never-ending East-coast wind and rain; sometimes it was terrain – steep hills are practically unavoidable here in Nova Scotia; and sometimes it was my own silly fault – shoelaces coming undone or a few too many pints the night before! But blaming those conditions felt a bit too easy. I worried that I had peaked in my first race – that I, like some forgettable 80s pop act, was a “one-hit wonder.”
In my frustration, I did what any stupid rookie would do: I trained harder. It’s no surprise that somewhere on the track that I was using for punishing interval sessions, I dropped and lost the simple joy of running and racing. In fact, during races, I spent more time looking at my watch than at the road. And the result was frustrating – I would burn hot and fizzle fast. My legs just couldn’t do what I was screaming at them to do.
So I gave up.
No, I didn’t give up running altogether; instead, I gave up my driving obsession with PBs. For a month before Digby, I trained easier, went to the track less. I ran most runs comfortably and sought out beautiful lakeside and oceanside trails. I rediscovered the joy of breath after breath, stride after stride goalless running.
And guess what? I finally broke my PB… by 11 seconds. And I didn’t look at my watch once during the race!
Now, I can’t say here that I suddenly became some kind of Zenned-out guru runner floating on clouds of bliss. Like I said at the start of this piece, my sense of relief crowded out the simple joy I might otherwise have felt after the race. PBs still mattered a lot to me. Nor can I say that the best way to a PB is to train less – it was most likely a combination of hard and easy training that precipitated that run. And to mar any clear lessons further, the PB could simply have been the result of a lucky combination of conditions: the day was cool but not cold, the wind was absent, and the course was net downhill.
So what is a poor rookie to think?
Actually, I’m of two minds about PBs now. On the one hand, nothing motivates my will to train more than trying to score a PB at an important race. On the track, when my lungs are searing in their own blood, my quads turning into sludge, and my bowels filling with lactic acid, sometimes the only thought keeping me from quitting, the only thought chasing me around the track for one more repeat is the desire for a PB. In fact, PBs provide a kind of end goal that seems to give meaning to all the weeks of hard training leading up to a race. I run because I want to improve my times. Makes sense. Otherwise, running might simply become an aerobic form of sadism! The quest for PBs keeps us runners noble and sane (we hope).
On the other hand, PBs are a bit of a sham. The assumption underlying my PB mania is that any two races of the same distance are comparable. I assume that the time I run in, say, the Lunenburg World Heritage 5k is meaningfully comparable to the time I run in the Digby Scallop Festival 5k. They are, after all, both advertised as 5km road races.
But the similarities between the two courses pretty much end at advertised length. Both have hills, but Digby is more forgiving because it has a long, gentle downhill to ease the pain of the one major uphill on the double-loop course. Lunenburg wrenches you up and plummets you down as you pass over the ends of the drumlin on which the town is built. No wonder I ran a better time at Digby!
The problem with comparing race times is that you can never separate the times from the particular conditions of race day – we run enmeshed within the racing environment. For example, the second 5k I ever raced was in Enfield, Nova Scotia. I was feeling good, my training indicated that I was running faster than ever, but the day was pure misery: cold driving winds swirled along the unsheltered road – rain was soaking racers to the bone and running shoes to the sole even before the gun went off. No wonder I ran a better time at Digby!
Running performance is so dependent on conditions, and conditions are so fleeting and particular, that it is impossible to compare race times without ignoring all the unique external factors that shaped each race. Relative to the conditions, my Enfield time may actually have been better than my Digby time. In fact, at Enfield, I finished ahead of a few runners who normally beat me, some of whom beat me at the Digby race. But Digby is my PB simply because the numbers on the finish-line clock were lower.
Unless you want to race only on treadmills in climate-controlled rooms, you’re stuck with a series of times that don’t stack up flush against each other. Since race times lose much of their meaning when abstracted from race conditions, using PBs as inspiration for training seems silly – and potentially frustrating. Too much of a PB performance is beyond control – you can train weeks for a goal race, only to run slowly because of cruddy conditions. In the end, how proud can I feel of a race time that is as much due to the course terrain and the weather as my own training and race strategy?
After Digby, I’ve tempered my obsession with PBs, but I haven’t let go of it entirely. I still think pursuing PBs is a fun way of giving my training direction. Deep-winter treadmill runs would surely break me if I didn’t once in a while slip into a daydream about surging past the line in personal record time. PB pursuit seems healthy to me, as long as I remain aware of the dependence of race times on race conditions. That way, I won’t get too frustrated after a slower race and, even more importantly, won’t get too proud after a fast one.
After all, there’s more to this running gig than simply shaving seconds off of past performances… right?
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