5K Madness

When my Afib issue surfaced in the fall of 2007 I thought my days of hard racing might be over forever. Last season taught me that clearly wasn’t the case.

The Endurance Nation training strategy includes relatively short but highly intense workouts throughout the winter months. We use 5K races for running fitness benchmarking. The last two seasons had me sitting on the race sidelines, “guesstimating” my running fitness, while I learned to manage my heart electrical problems. So this season I was really itching to train and benchmark the EN way. I signed up for five 5K road races. Today was the final of those, the third of three Frozen Foot series races in Elizabethtown. I was happy to walk away with the third place age group medal for the race series. In all I placed three times over the course of the five races. My first road running medals since I was a teenager. Pretty cool.

My times progressively improved throughout the winter. I started at 21:14 in early November and finished today with a 20:20. My pre-season goal was to break the 20-minute mark by the first day of spring. I didn’t quite make it, but the aggressive goal kept me focused. I still hope to break that mark at Lancaster’s Race Against Racism in late April. Performance goals keep me focused and I have more fun when I set them.

My mom passed away the day before my fourth race – just three weeks ago. I woke up Sunday morning and felt like I’d been whacked over the head. As you might imagine the prior day was quite an endurance event in its own right, but on an entirely different plane. I was at her side when she died just 12 hours earlier. After a brief appearance at church I decided to run that day. I wanted a sense of normalcy. It wasn’t easy and I almost quit about 10 minutes in out of apathy, but somehow I summoned the energy to keep moving forward. My mom certainly did not teach me to quit. She was a fighter.

All that pain for a stupid 20-minute 5K? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I’m no Ryan Hall. When it comes to endurance sports I’m the guy who metaphorically busts his ass just to make the team. And that’s what I love about it. The beauty is in the pursuit of excellence, in being “the man who is actually in the arena,” as Teddy Roosevelt said. The lessons of mental tenacity taught through endurance sports translate to all facets of life.