The cruelest distance
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 05, 2016
It's the one distance I don't know how to race. Never have figured it out. As suggested by legendary running coach Jack Daniels, it's the "cruelest distance."
Tomorrow morning I will run the Across the Bay 10K, across Chesapeake Bay Bridge from the western shore to the eastern shore of Maryland, with 25,000 other runner friends. (It's the U.S's fifth largest 10K and, in a testimony to its scale and unique nature, just yesterday it was acquired by the Ironman organization).
I am sure I will find the event a fun spectacle, and for the views and experience, surely worth running.
But I want to race, not just sightsee. And therein lies the problem.
As I learned long ago, 10K (6.2 miles) as a road race distance lies in no-man's land, at least for me, but as Daniels suggests, likely for most other runners. It's in no-man's land because it is too long to run near max, which is how I have learned to run mile to 5K (3.2 mile) races. And it's too short for a held-back, controlled pace to bring the best result, as is the case for distances of 10 miles or longer.
The challenge, as Daniels notes, is running hard but not so hard as to build up lactic acid in the muscles to the point of debilitation. Lactic acid buildup is what one experiences when racing over his or her lactate threshold heart rate (for me last I checked in the mid 160s). The shortness of a 5K allows one to get away with running over threshold, but for the 10K distance this strategy will most likely lead to a poor race, with a big tail off in the later miles.
The trick, it seems, is to run "on the edge" where the lactate build-up is not so great. When running this finely honed just-below-threshold pace over 10K, the runner's end state is not debilitation, but rather, as Daniels calls it, "total body fatigue."
I have gone out too fast in 10Ks and died. I have backed off in 10Ks and run too slow given my fitness. As I remember my 10K PR race, I went out too hard the first two miles, went too slow in the next three miles and was able to pick it back up in mile 6. Not exactly a well crafted strategy...
Tomorrow I think I will view the race as two in one. Because the first half is mostly up the west side of the bridge - a gradual but long uphill - my plan is to go hard but not so hard as to burn out on the uphill. I will do my best to stay just a bit under my threshold pace and not become too dispirited by my slower mile splits. Then, in the mostly downhill back half, I will push more, enjoy the faster splits and see how long I can sustain an at or even over threshold pace.
I have no idea of how this will work. But since I have yet to master this distance and have the added attraction of a bridge in the middle, why not be creative?
As the running shirt says, "It's just a bridge. Get over it!"
