Malcolm Gunn

Looking for my running mojo

Posted by Malcolm Gunn on 21 February 2010 | 2 Comments

There's a lot to be said for managing expectations  - both your own and those of others.  That is especially so when it comes to physical activity that is firstly measurable and secondly when conducted against the greying background of the ageing process.  After fifteen years of dedication to the bicycle as an exercising medium, on Sunday I went back to my roots, so to speak and ran a half marathon.  Fifteen years is a long time and while I haven't exactly been inactive in the last decade and a half, I haven't worn out many pairs of running shoes.  

I self seeded myself somewhere in a pack of a few hundred runners and walkers for the 21.1km run around the bays.  We were advised by the loudspeaker-enhanced voice of authority to "make sure you start in the right group, with runners at the front and walkers to the rear", I tried to distinguish runners from walkers.  Surely the kakapo suited woman was a walker, but can anything be certain about someone who dresses up as a kakapo for 21km on foot around the bays?  Probably not.  Luckily most of the people around me were runners, so the congestion was manageable and we set off at a good, comfortable pace, eventually finding some space.  Conscious of being a bit under-prepared (the bikes still get most of my attention), I was wary of taking this too lightly and so settling in to a 5min/km pace seemed sensible.  It was easy to ignore the sirens calling for a clearly unsustainable 4min/km pace that was once the slow side of the norm.  The road to hell is littered with the souls of those who think they can still do what they once found easy.  The last thing I want to be is the running equivalent of those women who have earned the collective moniker "18/50s" - by dressing like 18 year olds at the age of fifty.  I'm 53 and I'm going to bloody well act like it.  This called for dignity in the face of suffering. 

A tail wind from Point Jerningham had the temperature soaring and by Greta Point, I was recognising people I passed as the enviable youths who'd cleared out on me in Oriental Bay.  It felt good.  For a couple of kms along Evans Bay Parade I matched strides with a runner who I thought would be with me for the rest of the race and we passed a good number of people then, just before swinging into the wind at Burnham Wharf he dropped off the pace.  Some strategic placement behind others on the windy headlands out to Pt Halswell had me running economically and feeling great as the race leaders passed by, heading for home. 

Kau Bay and Mahanga Bay were again warmer without the headwind and the turnaround back into the stiffening northerly was welcome.  By now, most of the fun had gone and the non cycling muscles were sending unwanted messages to the pain centres of my brain.  The pace was unchanged, but the experience was very different.  I've done enough running for this to be a familiar thing; It was time for an effort.  A few runners came past, and I put this down to post-turnaround-euphoria and tried to lock onto their pace and stay with them.  Alas they weren't waiting for me so I let them go and repeated the exercise.  After a couple of km of this, some of them came back to me.  The tortoise was happy to take the lead again. 

By time we hit Evans Bay Parade again, with just under 3km to go, I told my screaming calves to shut-the-hell-up and stop spoiling my fun.  Everyone was hurting, but mostly they seemed to be hurting more than me and the part of my brain that has been dormant since I ran in a Scottish Harriers singlet awakened and I passed a dozen or so others in the last 2km. A unique feature of the event was merging the half marathon finishers with the 7km fun run finishers about 500m from the finish.  This required a fair bit of dodging five-abreast families, scooters, trikes and the like near the finish.  I was surprised to see no wrecked fun runners' bodies being loaded into ambulances after encounters with the sharp end of the half marathon field.

I finished in around 1:41 which was satisfying despite being a personal worst time.  I put this satisfaction down not to my slow buildup of training distance, nor to a rigorous and dedicated training regime, but to a thorough commitment to expectation management.

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