corri per padova

Bodies in motion

To our delight, Padua has an electrically alive running scene.  It hosts a thriving professional track club with world class runners, devotes a weekend in April to a marathon, and even has a weekly series of Thursday night fun runs.  Called the Corri per Padova series, these fun runs of four or five miles begin at a different part of the city each week and bring out hundreds of runners and walkers of all levels.  Tammi and I missed the sign-up deadline for last night's run by five minutes, but what we saw presented quite a spectacle: runners gathered under the inflatable start gate and clad in the reflective vest that comes with cheap five-euro sign-up fee, an MC who introduced two major Italian running figures, Ruggerio Pertile (2008 olympian and Padovan local who trains in Kenya most of the year) and Orlando Pizzolato, the last Italian winner of the NYC marathon ('84 and '85).  Tammi and I joined the tail end of the walkers and strolled for about half a mile before the group got away from us.

there they go

Lately I have been training more by feel and time than by mileage and rigid workout schedules, and I think it's getting me fitter.  If I feel like going farther and longer I will, and I've been trying to go to the track more and just get used to running faster.  I think it's improving my biomechanics and opening up my stride and my body.  On my ten-miler this morning I felt a lot looser, my range of motion greater, for having done the 800s yesterday.  Instead of the usual route, I took a detour to the track this morning and added a mile of 200m sprints followed by 200m jog (4x200 fast total).  I've made friends with the track this spring and I hope it results in some faster race times. As legendary coach Billy Squires said to Bill Rodgers once, they don't give the medal to the runner who can run all day but the runner who gets there first.  (See an excellent profile of Squires here.)

Still, I am four to five pounds overweight right now and I lack the discipline to do anything about it.  I'm very good at the running part of training, doing the miles and intervals and all that--but there's a non running component where I completely fall short.  This component involves stretching, core strength, and diet, all supplementary but hardly inessential.  If you don't stretch your stride lacks its fullest range of motion; with a weak core you waste energy stablizing yourself; if you don't watch what you eat you carry around a few extra pounds of mass that at a cost of about a second per mile per pound (where this figure comes from I'm not sure--it's so convenient and round that I'm skeptical of it but it's obviously true that it's better to weigh less), an extra pound of fat could over the course of a marathon make a difference of a minute or two.  As one whose marathon PR is tantalizingly close to 2:30, this matters to me.  So every time I eat a pastry I feel like I'm betraying myself and my training and I wonder what it is in me that can't sacrifice suguary, flaky, chocolately-delicious immediate gratification for what I know would be a lifetime of satisfaction from a new PR. 

People sign up for marathons thinking they'll feel invincible when they're done, but they inevitably come away humbled and painfully aware of their physical, even psychological, limits.  My inability to master my desire for sweets has given me empathy for the obese and their struggles and has administered another one of life's lessons about the limits of will power and reason.