This last week was my 60th birthday…which I was not going to make into a ‘thing’ at all for MVXC and MVTF. It’s just another birthday! However my own trainer, Chris Hallford, was working with a couple of our girls that day, helping get them ready for the 2019 track season, and he told those girls about my birthday workout. I started getting messages asking ‘did you really do what I heard you did, Coach?’ The stories were getting somewhat exaggerated as the story repeated. So, here is the story…
On my 60th birthday, I ran a workout of 60 x 200m on the Seaside High School track. Yup. Seven and a half miles of 200s.
It was kind of nuts, for sure. I was trying to think of something I could do that was a multiple of 60 and still doable. I really didn’t have any idea of how I should pace this, but I did want to try to work down my pace by two seconds per rep for each set of 12 reps. I started out at 50, and for the first two sets I felt like I was holding back a little; but by the last two sets the combination of slightly faster targets and the accumulation of 40-plus 200s started to make the intervals a LOT more interesting! I was giving myself 30 seconds between reps and that started getting VERY short. On reps 56 to 59 I could feel myself start to give up a little bit just before the finish; you know the difference you feel when you kind of sit back the last few steps of the rep or the race instead of pushing through the finish? The last rep I scolded myself a little and said to myself ‘last one, best one, you only get one shot at your 60th rep, come ON Kirk’ and I did finish with my fastest split of the day!
So happy. That workout was really satisfying. Excellent birthday.
I was not even sure my Polar would even record more than 100 intervals (60 work bouts + 60 recovery intervals)
One of our MVXC alumna phoned me up a couple days later to say happy birthday (we have birthdays that are close to each other and we talk in early December most years). When I told her about the workout, she was kind of quiet and then asked, ‘do you think there was any training benefit to that workout?’ First, that’s a great question–clearly her college coach is talking regularly about what each workout intends to accomplish! Second–the answer is, probably there is some training benefit. There was seven and a half miles at a pace that took me through my VO2MAX and anaerobic power training zones all the way to speed development, so there was some benefit (however the volume was excessive and I probably paid back some of the training effect with some sorry runs the next couple of days, and the injury risk was probably not in line with the expected benefit).
But any potential training benefit wasn’t really the point of the workout, was it? The point was to do something challenging and satisfying and goofy for my birthday, just to see if I could. And being able to do this was completely satisfying! As good a birthday as I could hope for.
Some of you shared your own birthday challenges with me–that was cool too. And I really hope that many of you are still running and challenging yourself when you are 60, too. Hanging on to a little of MVXC/MVTF for the rest of your life is a bit of a goal for the program. I think it would be great if you went out and ran 40 or 50 or 60 reps on your birthdays and your kids were there saying “I don’t know why mom/dad is doing this, it seems pretty weird…but it’s kind of cool too.” And if you do, I hope you think of me just a little. That would be just fine, and the best birthday present I could ever want.
My workout report card.
Postscript
Since any good post has to include an Angela Duckworth quote, so here you go; Angela says
“Greatness is doable. Greatness is many, many individual feats, and each of them is doable.”
I’m not saying that my birthday workout was great at all–heck, most of the team could smoke any one of my intervals, even the fastest. But what is kind of remarkable is putting 60 repeats together. I think as we get started towards the 2019 track season, and as some of us start thinking about college, and we have other goals and objectives…stringing together lots of individual, doable acts can give us something remarkable–or even great. For this track season, you can decide to go out and work out for 90 minutes today. That is a completely doable feat, one 90 minute workout. And since you can accomplish that one workout, you could do that again and again day after day and week after week…and end up with something like 140 workouts from now until our league championships. One workout is doable…140 workouts strung together in a season is great. Going to college and working hard for one day is doable…stringing together eight years of ordinary, focused days can give you a PhD which is simply great. Run 200 meters in 50 seconds and you are an old man jogging around the track…run that distance 59 more times in a row and your friends are calling you up and saying that was unbelievable (and maybe borderline crazy).
See? Everything comes back to Angela Duckworth and Grit!