Spring!

It’s spring.

Want to know how I know? Well, there are some people who wait until they see their first robin to declare spring – they rely on the return of migrating birds. Others wait for the “official” declaration on the day of the spring equinox. Still others rely on groundhogs. But I have a more definitive method: spring is here when our coach Cliff emails everyone to say that the Wednesday workout is moving from the Halifax Commons to the SMU track. The thing is that Cliff is a little shy around the whole email thing. He checks his email maybe twice a month – he sends emails twice a year – spring and winter. So my heart leapt for joy yesterday when I saw his very short but very polite email: “Dear Doug. We will meet at Saint Mary’s tonight. Cliff.” Is there any more elegant sign of spring?

For our first time back on the track, Cliff went easy on us: 4x150m (@1500m pace), 5x1200m (@ threshold 3:34/k), 4x150m (@1500m pace). We were a little fast on the 12s, but not dangerously so. It was just so nice to spin around and around the track.... and without any knee pain whatsoever!

I learned something interesting last night at practice. There’s a guy who sometimes shows up to train with us who used to run for Ethiopia. He was never world class, but he was fast – rumour has it he ran under 30min for 10k. Anyway, he was chatting the other week with one of the guys I train with, and he said that guys like Haile Gebrselassie (another Ethiopian) do their easy recovery runs at around 5:00/km. For a guy like Haile who’s run a 2:03 marathon, that’s really slow. Obviously, his fast workouts are damn fast, but he slows it way way down for the recovery days.

At first I thought, awesome, I run faster than Haile on my recovery days. Then I thought – wait, why the heck am I running my recovery runs faster than one of the greatest distance runners ever runs his? Huh. I’m thinking it might be wise to slow things down on Mondays and Thurdays or Fridays (depending on which day I take off). I can’t run my intervals like Haile, but I can run my recoveries like him.