“Good opening quote….. Keep at it, Mr. Mom.”—My dad
If you can’t count on your dad to bust your balls…
I know I mentioned in my last piece that I was going to consider letting my 10 year-old run with me, so I picked him up early from his after-school program on Thursday and brought him to the track. He was so excited. “Daddy,” he asked, “if I break a four minute mile before you, will I get the money? I mean, will you give me some of the money?” I’m not sure where he thinks all of this money is coming from, but I assured him that, like any money I ever get, I would use it for the family and that yes, I would give some of it to him. Or, you know, use it for his college.
We did the sprint a lap, walk a lap routine, and he did a pretty good job of keeping up with me (which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise because I am old and slow, and his knees are 31 years younger). I don’t need to bore you with the sprint lap times, but our times ranged from 19.96 to 24.21. There were enough people on the track to slow us down a little bit on some of the laps (there was an old dude walking around obliviously looking at a sudoku print-out), and a few times my son cut in front of me which broke my rhythm and made me almost come to a stop.
The day after my run, I reached back out to the potential coach because I hadn’t heard from him in a while and was waiting to meet him for a beer to discuss a training plan. The following is our email exchange:
Me: “Hey Xxxx,
I just wanted to follow up and touch base. Are you still willing to meet for a beer and talk?
Thanks,
Paul”
His reply: “Yes, sorry Paul, this week has been really busy getting ready for regionals. Next week will be really busy as well prepping for nationals. I’d definitely still be interested in sitting down with you to talk, but I think it would have to be after Thanksgiving. If that would still be helpful to you, let me know!”
My response: “No problem at all. Good luck at both regionals and nationals. If you don’t mind me asking, since I plan to keep running between now and then, what would be the most efficient way for me to train until I can get a solid plan in place? I’ve been doing some interval training on the small track at the JCC, sprinting a lap and then walking a lap. Is that a good way to work on speed? Or at this point should I be focusing on just running for 20 minutes to build stamina?
Thanks man, I look forward to meeting.”
Him: “The answer right now is that stamina would probably be the best. BUT, I encourage you to buy a book on running if you have not yet that can start you off in the right direction. The most regularly used is Jack Daniels’ Running Formula. If you came to our discussion in a couple weeks having bought and perused that book I guarantee you’d take a lot more away.
Hope this helps!”
Me: “Awesome, thank you. I assume that Jack Daniels would be much more helpful than the other Jack Daniels…”
Him: “Haha, the one can make you faster, the other you only feel it.”
My son apparently went to the nurse’s office at school the next day saying his knee hurt, which caused him to miss basketball two days later (Saturday). I tried to run Saturday afternoon but my knee hurt too much, so I did some weight work instead.
Knee pain has been a pretty consistent theme so far, yet I’ve never had it checked out and am not in a rush to go to an orthopedist. However, there is a woman at work I’m friendly with who’s a physical therapist, so I asked her if there were any exercises I could do to strengthen the knee. She made a few suggestions, mainly that I put my feet at a 45 degree angle when I do the weight exercises to strengthen one of the muscles right next to the knee, so we’ll see if that helps.
It’s been a week since I’ve run. Part of the delay has been the regular business of life and part of it has been a sore knee. I was planning on running today, but I got the awesome call from the pediatrician’s office that my daughter’s long strep test came back positive. And then my younger son’s strep test came back positive as well, so they both had to be picked up from school. And since my wife had a meeting and couldn’t be home until close to 7 p.m., no run for me. But I really look forward to getting to run tomorrow.
Stay tuned.
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