Читать книгу Endure онлайн | страница 2
That is: with one exception. Two years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I ran a magical 5K in a small-town race in New Jersey, finishing a full minute faster than any 5K I’d entered since returning to serious running as a Master. On that summer day in New Jersey, I was suddenly my thirteen-year-old self from forty years ago in Cambridge. I dreamt big. I marveled at my running prowess. And then? Back to mediocrity again.
Like the obsessive person—and particularly obsessive runner—that I am, I have puzzled endlessly over those two anomalous races. I have running logs from my teenage years, and I’ve gone back over them, looking for clues. Was there some indication in my earliest training of that kind of performance? Did I do something special? For my latter 5K, of course, I have infinitely more. Months of data from Garmin on every workout leading up to the event, and then still more from the day of the race itself: pace, cadence, splits. On more than one occasion, leading up to a race, I’ve attempted to replicate the exact preparation I had for my New Jersey PR. I want lightning to strike twice. It hasn’t, and I’m beginning to suspect the reason it hasn’t is that I don’t properly understand what it means to perform a feat of endurance. I think you can see where I’m going with this: I am the perfect audience for Alex Hutchinson’s Endure.
A few words about Alex Hutchinson. We are both Canadians and both runners, although he is both a better Canadian (he still lives there; I don’t) and a much better runner than I ever was. He invited me once to a tempo run he does with his friends on Saturday mornings in a cemetery in North Toronto. As I recall, I finished last—or maybe second last, since one of his running crew very sweetly condescended to run at my pace. Alex disappeared from sight after the first bend. As you will discover, as you continue in these pages, Alex writes about the mysteries of endurance as a student of the science, a sports fan, and a keen observer of human performance—but also as a participant. He has his own anomalous races to explain.