After falling off my horse and landing on my head in my last distance running effort (see Jacksonville Marine Corps Half Marathon entry on Oct. 3), it gives me great pleasure to report an overwhelming positive result in my competitive distance running.  Today, I ran the Evergreen Pumpkin Run 10 mile race in Jacksonville in glorious 70 degree weather and moderate humidity.  Those friendly race conditions yielded one of those classic “aha!” moments for me:  training and racing in Florida actually has its perks and I plan to savor every moment of these training “glory days” from now through March.  Consistent with my tradition of pop music analogies in my blog entries, I think “Back in the Saddle” (one of my favorite songs by Aerosmith) effectively captures my festive mood in feeling like a legitimate distance runner today for the first time since the turn of the 21^st century (or so it seems).

My time goal today was 1:16 and I nailed it (1:16:01).  I started at 7:55 for the first mile and ran negative splits throughout the race, capping it off with a 7:16 last mile.  I enjoyed picking off other runners during the second half of the course, which I rarely do, and further enjoyed not getting picked off in the last mile by some of my friendly rivals, which has happened more often in 2009 than I’m willing to admit.  My pace per mile today was 7:36, which is an entirely different level of performance from the miserable 8:20 pace that I ran just three weeks ago in the Jacksonville Marine Corps Half Marathon.  I also placed 10^thin my 45-49 age group today , which earns me my first Grand Prix points since 2007 in the 1^stPlace Sports Grand Prix Circuit.

Based on today’s time, I am on schedule to break 1:40 at the Outback Half Marathon, which would be my first sub-1:40 half marathon since 2003.  More importantly, I’m also on track to run a 3:30 marathon at Tallahassee in February, provided that my long runs go well for the next few months and I am able to avoid the Swine Flu pandemic and remain injury free.  I will run a 15-mile training run next Sunday, which will be my longest training run of the year.   I’m really looking forward to it.

So, that nasty brick wall of “hard training and no detectable progress” is finally behind me, which is very exciting.  This news comes as a great relief to me (and, no doubt, to Coach Paul McRae, who was beginning to wonder if I trained at all on my own between our group training sessions based on my disappointing race results since I began training with him in May).  More exciting still is that my training will continue to ramp up in the coming months during some fabulous training weather (at least most of the time), which will lead me to bigger and better race day performances.  But the icing on the cake is that my confidence is back, just in time to guide me through the most important months of my marathon training, and that makes all the difference for me.  How else do you think a 225-pound, bowlegged old guy can actually move through space at this pace for this long unless being propelled by an artificially inflated sense of what he thinks he is capable of achieving on the roads?  My new confidence will enable my head to push my body to the outer limits of its potential in training and racing, like it has for most of the past 30 years of my competitive running career, so those quitter voices in my head will have to take up residence elsewhere.

The best indication of how well today went was that after I finished, I wanted more.  I felt like I had saved too much.  My legs weren’t tired at all.  I wasn’t gasping for air and drooling at the finish the way I do after almost all of my races in Florida.  When I shared this impression with my wife and son, they thought that I was a victim of “invasion of the body snatchers” and that the spirit of some Olympic marathon hopeful had possessed me for the day.  After most of my distance races, my family is used to hearing how I plan to give up running and how I wish I had taken up golf and bowling as my primary sports.  But not today.  To satisfy my heathen blood thirst for more running, I plan to go for a three mile recovery run on the beach with my wife and son this afternoon.  My name is Randy and I’ve finally rediscovered my addiction to distance running.  Now hook me up with some more of those beta endorphins!