I ran the Leeds Abbey Dash yesterday. For the 6th time. Last year I ran it in 49:17. In many ways speed was all I cared about last year. This year remaining uninjured has become more important than speed.
To give you some idea of relative speeds, a week before last year's Abbey Dash I ran a 5k in under 23 minutes. This year it's been 6 months since I ran one in less than 24 and a half.
So, to run a 10k PB yesterday would have defied all logic. Even to get sub 50 seemed a long shot, but with my friend Kerrie offering to pace me, that's what I was aiming for.
I got over excited at the start, and started running ahead of Kerrie. 4:40 for the first k. My ego was telling me to go for the improbable 49 minutes. By 3k I knew that was a mistake. Kerrie had said if you're doing it right, it's meant to hurt but I'd gone too far.
14 minutes in I wasn't just in the pain cave I was the Chilean miners stuck in their mine. I was the 13 Thai schoolboy football players miles underground with flood waters rising.
I panicked. I thought Kerrie would be better off leaving me to it, and I told her she could if she wanted.
I thought I'd blown it and I had no idea how to make it through another 7k, through another 35 minutes. I'd entered a nether world of pain where I just wanted it to stop.
Rewind a year. After last year's Abbey Dash I was walking along Street Lane in Roundhay and I heard someone calling my name. It was Kerrie from the doorway of Banyan, she saw me go past and asked me to join her and some other Roundhay Runners for drinks. It was the first day I'd properly been out socially with them. It was from that day that they started to become friends and not just people I ran with.
Exactly a year later, here I was with Kerrie again. Let's just slow down for a bit, she said, get things under control. So we did. For a couple of k.
At the 5k point at the Abbey it really helped that other friends from Roundhay Runners were there, cheering me on. I hoped they couldn't see how bad I was feeling but of course they could.
Somehow, in the second half of the race I managed to settle down a bit. The impossible simply became difficult.
I felt myself coming back to life. And yet, at the point where Kerrie said, only 7 minutes of running left, I didn't believe I had 7 more minutes in me. When she said only 3 more minutes I felt the same.
It seemed to me that only when I crossed the finish line and I had actually finished did I really believe I would finish.
Our finish time: 49:59. By exactly one second we got what we were aiming for.
I was 42 seconds outside a PB. But it really didn't matter. It wasn't my fastest run, but it was one of my best.
At the start Kerrie said I'll do the pacing, you do the running' I made life more difficult for myself by not trusting in that enough at the start, but the main thing was just to keep going.
Too often I'm a skeptic, a pessimist, my own worst enemy. Someone who's anxious and afraid, who doubts himself, who makes life harder than it needs to be. On the day I didn't quite believe in myself enough. At 3k my internal monologue was trailing me through the dirt, like someone in a western who's been shot but is attached by one foot to a horse which is still running. But the external monologue of a friend, running with me, who calmly talked me though it and who wouldn't leave me behind when I wanted to leave myself, carried me through.
We went for burgers after the run to a place called Almost Famous. With the race now finished, I said to the people around me that I was experiencing a 'feeling of genuine happiness'. Chris said to me that's what I should call this blog post. So, there it is.
Some people I talk to think running sounds nuts. And sometimes it is. Running can be the best I ever feel or the worst I ever feel. On a 10k it's usually both.
If this story has a hero, then because it's my story, I would say that it's Kerrie. But that's not the whole story. We were in it together and I did my part too.
Postscript. If you care about such things, here is my race according to Strava. Quite an accurate reflection of how I was feeling.
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