Throughout my entire life, sports have played a major role. I have competed at various levels in baseball, softball, basketball, touch football, and soccer. While I have had a decent amount of success during my time competing, I was admittedly never the most skilled athlete. In fact, the one "skill" that allowed me to hold my own was that I was fast. So whatever sport I played, the role that I gravitated towards was always one that required speed. In theory, that sounds like a perfect base for a runner. The reality is slightly different.
The problem is, my speed is very much short distance speed; I can run fast for very short periods of time. I did compete in cross-country from grade 7 all the way through grade 12, however it was mainly to keep myself in shape for the other sports I competed in. Our training basically consisted of just going for a run, with very little structure or planning. I actually found an old cross-country result of mine on the NLAA website. This is from the 1997 NLAA Provincial Age Class Championships, which means I was 15 years old:
It might be hard to see, but that's me, finishing 30th out of 37th runners, with a time of 19:33 for 4km. So cross-country obviously wasn't my forte, although it is pretty cool to see that I'm faster now over that distance than I was then!
Once I graduated high school, I pretty much stopped running. Every now and then I would go out for a short run, just 4 or 5 km, but never anything consistent. In 2007, I briefly started to train for the Tely using the training program outlined in the paper. Unfortunately, I didn't take the time to pick out proper running shoes, and after a couple of training runs my feet were hurting so much that I just decided to stop and focus back on my other sports.
Jump ahead to 2013, and that is where my distance running "career" really began. In the beginning, I drew inspiration from some of my family members. My sister, who was never overly into sports, had taken up running that spring as part of a commitment to a healthier lifestyle, and she was planning to run her first Tely. In late June, I traveled to Ontario to visit my Aunt and Uncle, and as avid runners they were planning a trip home to run the Tely that year as well. Being around a bunch of people who were so enthusiastic about the race got me thinking about running it, but could I really do it on 3.5 weeks of training?
The answer to that question is likely that I shouldn't have, but I decided to try. I flew home from Ontario on July 1, went to the Running Room on July 3 and bought a pair of shoes, and did my first training run on July 4. That was the first time since high school I ran more than 5 km. So over the next two weeks, I slowly built my distance, but I still wasn't sure I could actually run 16 km. Luckily, Tely registration was open until the Monday before the race that year. So the Sunday before, I decided to run the course and see if I could do it. I went slow and steady, and managed to finish it, so that night I registered for the race. The next Sunday, on July 28, I completed my first Tely 10!
Now, obviously, I wouldn't recommend my approach to anyone new starting out. I had a number of positive factors in my favour. I was relatively young (31 at the time), quite active from other sports, and I had experienced runners in my family who I could turn to for advice. Even with all that, I still probably put myself at risk for injury by pushing it so far, so fast. But once I did it, I was hooked. After a brief chat with uncle Keith about what I should do next, I decided to register for the Cape to Cabot. Why not jump in with both feet, right?
After a more proper training program of 2.5 months, I completed my first Cape to Cabot in October 2013. While I was on the bus heading to Cape Spear, I sat with Marc and had a chat about running and what his future plans were. He noted that he was planning to go to Ottawa the next spring with some members of PRC to run the Ottawa Marathon, and he said I should think about it. After completing a Tely 10 and a Cape to Cabot in my first 4 months of running, a marathon seemed like a logical next step. So over Christmas of that year, I made the decision to run the 2014 Ottawa Marathon, registered and booked my hotel, and started planning for the long months of training ahead.
My daughter and I after C2C 2013
Since I stopped running after the Cape to Cabot in October, I had to build up almost from scratch when I started training for the marathon in January. I didn't do as good a job of recording my runs back then, but from what I have recorded I ran about 550 km over the next four months, which seemed like a lot at the time. It was enough to get me to the finish line in just under 4 hours, but it was a struggle at the end! I followed the 3:45 pace bunny for the first 28 km, and then he had to drop out due to injury. As my watch had chosen not to work that morning, I was then left to run the last third of the race with no concept of my pace, which was not something I was accustomed to at all. I made it to about 36 km, and then had to alternate walking and running for the last 6 km. At the end of the day, it wasn't perfect, but I was still elated to have accomplished such a difficult feat.
Celebrating with PRCers in Ottawa!
With that marathon finished, I had now completed a Tely 10, a Cape to Cabot, and a marathon within 11 months of starting to run. While I was very happy with what I had done, I think I had also probably burned myself out on running a little bit. I was still playing basketball and football at that time, and so while I continued to compete in races for the rest of 2014, my training was never really where it should have been. This continued into 2015, where I only completed the Tely 10 and the Cape to Cabot. In fact, when I did the Tely in 2015 I had yet to run past 10 km that year.
After running slower than my PBs in both races in 2015, I decided that I wasn't enjoying running under the current circumstances. I am a competitive person, even if it's just competing against my past self. I realized that as the years went on, trying to improve my running times while still playing high impact sports like football and basketball just wasn't going to work out. Since the schedule for running was much more conducive to life with young kids at home, I decided that 2016 would be a year where I would step back a little from my other sports and dedicate more effort to running. That plan was only accelerated when I tore my rotator cuff during my last football game of the 2015 season!
So that covers my running story from the start to the end of 2015. I obviously glossed over a lot of details in this post, so feel free to comment with any questions. I plan to write a separate post covering 2016, as I'd like to talk in a bit more detail about how I changed up my training, and the results that I was able to achieve by doing so.
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I promised some Turkey Tea talk above, but this has been a long post so I'll keep it brief. The Turkey Tea is a fast race, with only the 3rd and 4th kilometers being uphill, and the race overall being a big net downhill. I've run this race twice before, with my best time of 48:07 coming the first time I ran it in 2013. That actually stood as my 10 km PB up until June of this year, when I squeaked just below it with a 48:00 at the USR. So that is my current 10 km race PB, but my Garmin lists my best 10 km split as the first 10 km of this year's Tely, with a time of 45:24.
When I go into races, I like to have 3 goals, kind of my own personal gold, silver, and bronze medals. For tomorrow, I'm going to set 45:00 as my number 1, the 10 km Tely split of 45:24 as number 2, and 46:00 as number 3. Be sure to check back in for my training recap on Monday to see how I was able to do!
Cheers and Thanks for reading,
Ryan
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