City to Bay 2012

Last year I set out to run the City to Bay with little expectation. This year two things were different. Firstly, I had a goal to run the 12km race in under 1 hour. It didn’t have to be a lot. I would have been happy with a time of 59:59. It wasn’t going to be an easy achievement. Secondly, I’d convinced Michael to enter the run with me.

I trained as well as I could have managed this year, fitting it in around soccer, life and other general commitments.

I had a training program. I even had a GPS unit that helped me train to that program. What I didn’t have was single-minded devotion. In order to have done that I would have had to have stopped playing soccer and avoided all those other commitments that I mentioned before. I haven’t reached a point where I am prepared to do that to meet that goal of running the race in under an hour.

What I didn’t set myself as a goal was beating Michael. It never even occurred to me that it might be something worth aiming at.

Michael didn’t train. He played soccer for the school and did PE and that was about it. A couple of weeks before the race I suggested that he might like to come for a run with me. We jogged around to the local park, running together along the way. That was the warm up. When we started running, off he went. Not sprinting away, but starting quicker right from the get-go. It was only a small park, about 200m per lap. I watched him gradually stretch his lead and then gradually mow me down. He went past me and just kept going.

I didn’t delude myself into thinking that I should try and keep up, or improve enough to beat him, it simply wasn’t going t happen.

I think he may have run with me on 2 more occasions after that.

The first of those, his second run with me was an exercise in speed which meant spaced runs at higher velocities. When you’re busting your gut to finish the session off, what you need is your 15 year old sun running along beside you, maintaining the pace, but darting off to the side to jump up and rip leaves off trees, bounce of trunks and generally letting you know that not only is he not knackered and in danger of a heart attack, but that he’s a little bored and looking for some fun too!

His third run with me was the nice ‘taper’ run that I did 3 days before the event. A relatively easy exercise, not meant to wear you out too much. Michael was running with me, but it was clear once again that he was holding back. The fact that he was running along the top of 3 inch wide brick walls was probably the biggest clue!

On the day, I had one secret hope, not that I was focused on beating him. The only thing that would give me a sniff was if he ran out of puff because he’d never run 12kms before.

My aim was to chew through the race at 4:57 mins/km which in theory would have had me over the line in 59:24. I would have been quite ecstatic. I asked Michael at the start if he was going to run with me for a bit and then take off when I was slowing him down too much. His answer was very noncommittal.

He did run with me for just a bit. Basically right up to the start line, then as we crossed North Terrace, he bolted like a rabbit out the gate, up onto the footpath, round a couple of slow-pokes and off into the crowd.

I was on pace until the 7km mark but it was around then the GPS started telling me to hurry up. It continued to do this until the end of the event when I crossed the line in 60mins and 43 seconds.

43 damn seconds. It’s amazing just how close that seems and yet I know that I simply didn’t have it in me to drag that time back. I was stuffed. And waiting for me just past the finish line was Michael. He’d finished in 57:57.

My only consolation was that he was in about as much pain as I was and complained that he’d had to walk a bit because he’d cramped up. Some consolation. He walked a bit and still beat me over the line.

The other thing I worked out when I downloaded the data from my device was that I’d actually run a distance of 12.2kms. The time I’d run the race in was actually pretty much bang on (actually a fraction under) 5 min kms. So if I’d been able to run the damn thing straight instead of around all the people that were slower than me and if it had actually been just 12kms I would have hit my target!

But I still didn’t run the race in under an hour.

Looks like I’ll have to do it again next year.