Crazy Legs
Lessons from my Icarus moments
Cracked: Lessons From My Icarus Moments
You’ve heard all about the runner’s high. It’s time we, as runners, addressed an equally important aspect of our experience: the runner’s low. This is what happens when, after cruising confidently through the first portion of a race, you crash harder than the cymbal player in the finale to the 1812 Overture. I’ve suffered through many an epic bonk, at races of all types of distances, so I consider myself an expert on the subject. Here are a few lessons from some of these race disasters.
800m
The 800m – two laps around an outdoor track – is one of the few races where you’re expected to fade in the second half. The idea is to treat the two-lapper as an extended sprint, with a natural slow-down of one or two seconds every 200 metres. To put it another way, you run almost as fast as you can until the pain envelops you like a lead X-ray blanket, and cross the finish line with just enough juice left in your legs before they buckle. At an 800m race a few years ago, I decided to just go for it, and absolutely hammered the first lap. The second lap was the longest one minute and 12 seconds of my life, a full 15 seconds slower than the first lap. LESSON: There is such a thing as starting too quickly, even in a short race, and how is it possible for a race this short to hurt so much?
5K
The Ontario Masters Cross-Country Championships, a 5k event, took place on a golf course in Guelph. I arrived late and in a panic. When the starting horn sounded, I was still pinning on my bib number. I instinctively took off in a fight-or-f light response to the stress of my tardiness. I hit 1k faster than I had ever run a kilometre f lat-out. For a time, I was all alone, in first place, with no other runner even in sight behind me, but I knew what was coming. By 2k, I was running so slowly that it seemed almost the entire field ran past me in a matter of minutes. The next 3k was a death march. LESSON: Arrive to the start early, prepared, and with a good race plan, not late, frazzled, and with a race plan that consists solely of “Gwaaaaa!”
Marathon
I ran my third marathon in 2000, the New York City Marathon. Things got off to a bad start before the start. I didn’t have time to get a coffee before taking the bus to the athlete’s village on Staten Island, and when I got there, the coffee had run out. So I began the race in a decaffeinated daze. Still, I kept a good pace through the first half, and by the time I hit Manhattan, the huge crowds made me feel invincible. Nothing was going to stop me from setting a huge PB! Nothing! I hit the 20-mile mark, 10k to go. This, I thought, is when people told me marathoners often hit the wall. “Oh, he’s cracked!” I recalled a TV commentator saying during the Olympic marathon once, when one of the leaders suddenly dropped far off the pace. Just as I thought this, I cracked. The final kilometres winding up and down the hills of Central Park were unforgettable in how much suffering they inf licted upon me. LESSON: Don’t let the thrill of a big race, or spectators who mean well but who are blissfully unaware of your pacing strategy or physiological limits, push you into the trap of running yourself into positive-split oblivion. I could go on, but there could never be enough space to chronicle the full list of my catastrophic race implosions. But that’s part of the final lesson, which is: if you challenge yourself to f ly as close to the sun as possible, to run that thin red line of your full race potential, sometimes you’re going to come crashing to the ground. And that’s OK. After all, the runner’s lows make the runner’s highs that much sweeter.