I reckoned the day would come when Wyatt would get faster
than I am. I thought it would be about
his junior year of high school, but he may be running a little ahead of
schedule. He may be getting dangerously
close, in fact. Back in August I managed
a nice 9:42 3000m on the track, which would work out to about a 10:22 for
3200m. Two Fridays ago Wyatt ran a
10:25. Then last Friday on an evening
with a 15 mph south wind he ran a 10:24 and placed third, running very strong,
very competitively. Yes, dangerously
close, indeed. Tomorrow night his coach
has assigned him to specifically run for time.
For 9:50, in fact. Eleven seconds
faster than I have ever run 3200 meters in my entire life. We will see.
In the fall I got wicked fast. A mediocre 16:58 5k at the local neighborhood
race was the result of being under full marathon training load at the
time. I’m sure I could have gone 16:20
easily with a little 5k specific training and a little more rest before the race. I ran one workout, on Halloween in fact, that
was 4 x 5000, with 800m jogs in between reps, hitting the first 3 at about
18:50 and the last one at 17:40. Oh
yeah, I was getting to be a lean, mean, strong running machine. Then I think I fell off the edge of an
overtraining cliff and I’ve been struggling to recover ever since.
Meanwhile, the boy seems to be unstoppable, thank God. He’s just been getting stronger and stronger,
his young body just absorbing all the training his overzealous coach can throw
at him and turning it into strength and speed.
So, last week he told me that he had run a 3-mile tempo run in practice
in 17:20. Wow, although it was technically probably
only 4800m and it was on the track, that’s still a pretty darn good time for practice, and that was only 48 hours
after a wicked interval workout. As circumstances
played out, I had also planned to run a [true] 3-mile tempo run over the roads
last week as part of my gradual return to hard running. It was windy, and although relatively mild
terrain, it was still a lot harder than a track. Well, I think so.
Hey Dad, what did you run this morning?
Well, I did a ten-mile run consisting of a 7-mile warmup
segment and a 3-mile tempo segment.
What was your time?
You know, it was kind of windy and stuff this morning.
Yeah. What was your
time?
17:50.
Then he gave me that smile, and that look out of the corner
of his eye. During cross country last
fall I used to sneak him Moutain Dews for two reasons. First of all, they have a good dose of
caffeine and that’s a fine, legal performance enhancer. Secondly, he likes them, although he
generally tries to be a little careful not to drink them in front of his
coaches, because apparently they frown upon soda consumption. At some time toward the end of the season,
however, somebody caught him on camera, and you can see that mischievous look on his face. This is the same look he was giving me now.
This week as we close rapidly now upon his assault on a
sub-10:00 2-mile and my 6th assault on the Boston Marathon we
coincidentally ran another workout in common.
His was an 11:00 3200m tempo effort on Wednesday. This morning I managed an 11:04. “I still won,” he said as I slipped out the
door to take his brothers to school.
