The Hour

No, this is not a new direction for the blog - Virginia Woolf is not high on my reading list....

So the hour...

It's another arbitrary target, another random point in time that is utterly meaningless... and means everything... And I'm very conscious this is a running thing... and probably a me running thing.

Ten kilometres... 6.2 miles... in an hour.  Ten sub-6 minute kilometres, one after the other.  No let up, no easy kilometres in the middle, no real time to warm up - at least not for me.

And the hour has sat there, its something that's been discussed with my running mates, the fast ones giving hints and tips, the others commiserate and wonder if they'll ever get near too.

I'd all but given up, that elusive hour seemed to be slipping away... And I'm marathon training, so the mid-week runs are meant to be looseners, gentle plods that help the legs recover....

Apart from something didn't quite go to plan on Thursday, the first couple of k's were normal even down to having to stop to retie my shoe laces... The route is quiet, but bobs across enough roads that its inevitable that I'll be pausing to get across a road at some point, it doesn't quite get into the touristy bits of Liverpool, but I get close enough to the Liver Building that a few confused tourists need to be stepped around.

And then back along the Dock Road, up and down the countless kerbs...

I'm not sure when the legs started moving faster than normal - the first five k are good for me, for a training run very good and then I'm not sure what happened... the next two seemed quick, and then the turbo-charger came from nowhere... Three k, sequentially faster, each below 6min... finishing with a 5:34... This from someone whose 5km PB is 29:15... And this at the end of a 10k...

So, the hour.. Not quite... 45s are all that's left.  That's a two minute PB.  The previous PB was 2012... four years and bang two minutes off.

Forty-five seconds... I've two 10ks, proper races, to come in the run up to the Marathon.  Both favourite runs - the Liverpool Spring 10k around Sefton Park and then the Manchester Great Run.  I don't know if I'll get those 45s, because the long runs will take their tool... but I do know I can...

Which is, in one of my more reflective moments, why I run - to find out what this battered old body can do.  Like many with dicky-tickers I spent a lot of years believing what I'd been told I could do, rather than finding out what I could do... This year is very odd, the PBs I'm getting are huge, and I'm not sure why, and if this is me running at my limits then so be it.

Which takes me back to the hour, 46 seconds is what I need to do... That's it.  To get the hour.  A target, arbitrary, meaningless, and just there, tantalisingly close now.  Something I didn't believe I could do... Now I know I can...  

TTFN

Paul



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