Day 8 March 4, 2008
March has come in like a lamb this year. The temperature is almost to the fifties and climbing, even though it is still before 7 AM. I have spring on my mind and this premature seasonal exuberance determines where I’ll be running this morning. I won’t be covering very many new blocks. I’m headed to Upper Darby’s High School track. For years when I was growing up, the high school’s track was nearly unusable. It was an old cinder track. Cinder tracks used the unburned detritus of coal powered boilers. The friable material was used because it was dirt cheap, actually cheaper than dirt, since places would pay to have it removed. Athletic tracks were a perfect disposal solution since the material packed well, absorbed some water and contained no nutrients for plants. But the high school’s track had poor drainage and runoff from the slopes on two sides brought soil into the cinders so that mud could form. The surface rutted easily and pools of water would often stand at one end days after storms. Except for the captive track team most runners learned to avoid it. It was only good for steeplechases.
Fortunately the track got an extreme makeover in 2000 thanks to an environmental grant from the state. It seems that old car tires are now more of a disposal problem than old coal cinders. Used car tires stored outdoors are breeding grounds for West Nile virus mosquitoes. The mound of hollows make a much more fertile crescent than the puddles on the old track’s southeast curve. Somebody has figured out a way to chop up the tires and reuse the rubber. The new track has an Olympic caliber look and feel. It has permanent lane lines and markers. Now the surface is good for my old knees. It isn’t as hard as when the old track was dry, or as slippery as when it was mud.
I run up the “back way” off State Road between State Road Builder’s Supply and the construction site for a new set of stores. If you are as old as I am, you will remember the Geno’s, a pre-McDonald’s fast food restaurant, that once stood here. The “back way” is a treacherous short steep rocky trail that I’ve climbed a hundred times. It takes you past a monstrous cell phone tower at the corner of the softball field. The football bleachers are now under reconstruction so there is a detour to get down to the track. In the morning it glows invitingly.
Once a year I run a one mile race. It comes in June just after Father’s Day. Becoming a father hasn’t aged me as much as this race has. There are about a dozen of us who compete. The guy who usually wins is now over 60, but then he doesn’t weigh much more than that. Running four, five or six miles for exercise does not train you for competing in the mile. The formula for success has not changed since I was high school 40 years ago. You have to go to a track and run once around or twice around as fast as you can, as though a howling pit-bull was just two steps behind you. You have to run hard until your heart is pounding, your lungs are gasping and your thighs are burning. Then you have to stop and catch your breath, let your legs stop wobbling and let your heart climb back into your chest. Then you have to do it again, and then again, maybe four of five such “intervals.” They are called this because they mimic the excruciating interval between living and dying. They are not fun. They don’t make you feel better. They make you feel old, because you time them to the fraction of a second. And every year you get slower.
When I was in high school, we ran intervals almost every day. Now I can only do half as many, 50% slower, maybe once a week. The track was a quarter mile, 440 yards, in my day. Now it is a metric 400 meters, which is only 433 yards. The track has gotten shorter, but I’m not going to tell anyone. My stride has gotten shorter in the intervening decades. My heart heart can’t beat as fast. Its stroke has gotten shorter. My wind is shorter as my lungs can’t suck oxygen from the air like they used to. I’m even two inches shorter in height than I was then. But if I do these one of these workouts a week for the next few months, I can toe that starting line with those old men, and when the gun goes off, we can hold onto our youth just a little bit longer.
Distance: 3.37 miles Time: 33 min 13 sec Pace: 9:51 min/mile (minus track time)
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