O O Ø O O O O
100 Minutes
My day started with excruciating pain. If you have ever wondered what an iliotibial (IT) band injury feels like, imagine the muscles running along the outside of your leg stretched as if they were the strings on a violin. Now, play that violin with a bow made of barbed wire. This was the image in my head as I limped across the parking lot towards the start line of a 21.1km race: The Okanagan International Marathon, Half Marathon, and 10km Race.
Welcome to my hobby: Running. And meet my personal nemesis: my Iliotibial Band.
Okay, so it’s more than a mere hobby. Truth be told, I have been teaching a 1/2 marathon clinic for the last 16 weeks, and this past weekend was the culmination of that instruction—our graduation run. And though I’m perfectly happy to stand in front of a group of wonderful people and talk about the finer points of biomechanics, training plans, injury prevention, and nutrition, I’m apparently really bad at taking my own advice. Hence the injury.
There was a good 15 minutes to go before the race started. Figuring it couldn’t possibly make things worse, I set off for a little warm-up run. After five minutes of hell, the tension in my knee started to loosen up. The blood-curdling scream in my knee was becoming a dull roar. After 10 minutes, I almost felt like I could run the race.
I’ll take “almost.” It’s my graduation run, after all. Crowding into the start chute, I began to pick my way through the teeming masses of humanity to a starting position I could claim as my own. Like most races nowadays, Kelowna is a chipped event, meaning crossing the line as soon as the gun goes isn’t required. The first few kilometers of the race are still a slog, however, fighting through crowds of optimistic but not speedy racers. If you have ever wondered what being a salmon is like during spawning season, try running in a popular road race. As being closer to the front is better from a pure sanity standpoint, I picked my way through the crown until I had passed most of the pace bunnies. Only one set of pink ears, and several thousand bodies remained between me and the actual start. On those ears were stencilled the numbers “1:30″ —a time that, were I able to actually achieve it, would mean setting two back-to-back 10km personal bests. In other words, a task for another day. I left the bunny in front of me, and settled in to wait for the race start.
Suddenly, it was on. Trapped in the throng, I did what all runners do on their way to a crowded start line: assumed an odd, anxious shuffle—somewhere between a walk and a run—until the crowd began to move. The start line was marked my the screaming of the ChampionChip sensor mats. There, the crowd surged forward and began streaming up the road in an ever-narrowing mass of humanity, taking me and my throbbing knee along with it.
In any race, the first few kilometers are about finding the right rhythm. In a fit of optimism, I had printed a paceband with my personal best, and the associated kilometer splits the night before. It was carefully taped around my wrist, next to my watch, offering a clue as to how bad the day was going to be. As I picked my way through the crowd, I noticed the 1km marker on the side of the road. A glance at my wrist confirmed the hard truth:
4:36.
One kilometer into the race and already I was 9 seconds behind my target pace time. Worse, I was already nearing the top end of my half-marathon heart rate zone—a heart rate I had vowed to keep until the magical halfway point, when I could open up and leave it all on the course. Unclenching my teeth and setting my resolve, I settled back into a rhythm, picking a pace just a hairsbreadth faster than the one I had been doing. Truly, the race was on.
For the next 10 kilometers, I worked my way through the gradual uphill portion of the race. I was running by heart rate—slightly beyond what I knew I could sustain, punctuated at 10-minute intervals by a 20-second walk-and-water break. I was gunning for the 11km mark—the start of a gradual 6km downhill, and the point where I had decided to abandon the gentle pleadings of my heart-rate monitor in favor of an balls-out, leave-it-all-on-the-course 10.1km sprint. As I neared the mark, I glanced down at my watch, and the infernal paceband next to it.
53:01.
I was two minutes over. Turning of the infernal your-heart’s-going-to-explode beeping of my heart rate monitor, I kicked into the only gear I had left, and started hunting for butts.
There’s a trick you can use, when races start to get tough, to get your mind off the finish line, an back onto the immediate short-term problem of staying moving—the “butt trick.” The basic idea is to choose a suitable butt in front of you (what constitutes “suitable” is left as an exercise for the reader. I tend to go with ‘female’ and ‘faster than me.’) and reel it in. If you have chosen wisely, you will find yourself closing the gap. Once you pass it, you repeat the procedure with a fresh butt.
I applied the trick to the best of my ability. Four butts later, I found myself at the 17km mark.
There are psychological barriers in a race. The halfway point is one of them. Turnarounds in an out-and-back section are another. The 17km mark of the Okanagan race is marked by a turnaround—one positioned at the end of the gradual 6km downhill. Logic (and arithmetic) then dictate that the final 4.1kms of the race is a gradual uphill. My brain and my legs realized this at the same time, and for just a moment, I realized how much my body was starting to hurt. At times like that, when it seems like the body can’t give you any more, there’s really only one thing you can do:
Speed up.
If you’re going to go out, go out in style. Leave it all on the course. See what you’ve got.
So I did. My world began to collapse into a tunnel. Running at Anaerobic Threshold is fun that way. It also wreaks havoc with your math skills. I stopped looking at my watch as the numbers were no longer making sense. I stopped looking at the course, as I was seeing only blurry shapes. All I could feel were my legs screaming. All I could focus on were the butts in front of me. As I reeled them in, familiar voices began to creep into my awareness. I was starting to pass the members of my running clinic as they made their way towards the turnaround. I rasped out what I hoped would be taken as polite replies, and accelerated further. Then, just as the two directions of runners diverged, I saw my wife, running the other way. She waved and cheered. I realized I was going to make it, leg be damned.
I ran over hill, and over dale, or rather, over bridge and through tunnel. Rounding the final 200m into the finish, I passed by the 1:30 pace bunny, now long-since finished.
“Kick!” she yelled.
Kick, I did.
The end of the race was a blur. When I crossed the line, the clock had just ticked over 1:40:00. I realized I had just pulled off a 100-minute half—only a minute behind my personal best. My legs were burning. My IT band was screaming. My chest was heaving. But I was done. And then the endorphins started kicking in.
There’s a reason we runners put ourselves through this craziness. Running, like beating your head against a wall, feels great once you stop.
And that’s how I spent my Thanksgiving vacation.
The pd.o: We run, so you don’t have to.
Kjell Wooding
October 11, 2005
OOØOOOODCCXXV
October 12th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
You know, I remember that race from when I lived there…
…as I watched news highlights from the couch. Good job on the run, though.
–Alan
October 19th, 2005 at 5:39 pm
Hey Kjell! Been a while!
That’s a great time for a half! Doing it that fast injured is amazing. My best half was a 1:51.
Oddly enough, I was doing the Royal Victoria Marathon at the exact same time, with a very similar injury. Torn tendon right near the iliotibial band. At least that is what the physio guy thinks.
I was doing fine at the 21k mark (2:08), but around the 25km mark my injured leg started to complain…
Rest of the story here:
http://www.thievingjoker.net/article.php?story=20051013153955273
October 21st, 2005 at 2:38 am
Gord!
It’s amazing who you run in to (heh) in the blogosphere.
And yes. That word makes my teeth hurt.
October 25th, 2005 at 7:36 pm
Well done Kjell. Now in Ontario I still lurk and enjoy the wisdom of the pd.o saints.
October 25th, 2005 at 8:53 pm
Double-nn! Good of you to pop by!
All it takes is a little running post and look at all these folks coming out of the woodwork. It’s like an infestation. Of fit people. A fitfestation. Or something.