I’m eating Kraft Dinner. Spirals. Actually, I’m eating an entire box of Kraft Dinner spirals. Supper of champions. Sometimes this is just how it’s gotta be. I’m late getting home from tonight’s workout. J-A isn’t home. I’m tired; I’m ravenous; I hate cooking for one. This is the perfect time for a box of Krappy D. I mean, I can’t make quinoa minestrone or some other healthy delight every night. Sometimes I just can’t face an hour of chopping fresh vegetables. Sometimes I just wanna get down and dirty with some quick, simple carbs and a pile of radioactive-orange processed cheese-like food-ish product.
I’m not the only runner who eats bad food with impunity, though. When I first started training with Cliff and got to know some of the real elite road racers in the city, I was shocked at how crappy some of them ate. It was liberating, actually. I wasn’t the only one who’d eat an entire bag of chips just because it was there. There were others like me. And my world was made complete when the top marathoner in the province strolled into one après-long run brunch with a beer in hand. It’s everything you need after a long run, he said. I believed. Still do.
This is not to say all those top runners eat poorly – or eat poorly all the time. But extreme health ascetics are much rarer than I thought among runners that I train with, which is very good news for me. We run to eat. Or as my training buddy Alex says (quoting a local songwriter), everything in moderation, including moderation. Very wise.
Tonight’s workout was moderate. Cliff had initially planned a 5k race pace session of intervals at the North Commons, but conditions were far too icy for speed – so he scaled it back to threshold running (about half marathon race pace). Normally, we would’ve moved the workout indoors to the Dartmouth Sportsplex, but the track there is closed for the Canada Games. Go Nova Scotia!
The workout was conservative: 1 x 6min and 4 x 8min @ 3:37/km with 90s rests. The pace felt comfortably quick, which is exactly what a threshold pace should feel like. There should be no straining for the pace, and you should feel like you could hold it for about an hour, even though you are doing much less running than that.
Despite the ice and the cold, the workout felt great – and I was pretty excited because a 3:37/km pace translates to a 1:16 half marathon, which is exactly where I hope to be on race day. The fact that I can do close to 40 minutes of race pace comfortably in February is a big confidence boost.
But what I was thinking about while I was running over patches of ice and feeling the cold wind cut through my running tights in all the wrong places was that one of the main things that unites all runners in Nova Scotia is the inconvenient weather. I saw so many people out there running, and we were all dealing with the same ice and the same cold as best we could. We’re all a little bit crazy in the same way. Each one of us had to talk ourselves into our layers of gear and out of our warm houses. I like to think that this shared set of gestures means we run as a community, even when we run alone.
Not that it stops me from whining about the weather...
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