What a damn animalistic quote. I absolutely love it. You need to be maniacal to push yourself like that. There is a certain joy in pushing yourself beyond your limits. Really what are your limits anyway? How do you ever know you’ve reached them? The only way to do so is to keep pushing harder.

I won’t say that today during the Fred Lebow 5 miler in Central Park that I pushed myself to my limits. However, I did push myself at a faster pace than I have done so in quite some time. It felt good and bad at the same time. It always does. I wasn’t sure how fast I would be able to run at. I just ran a pace that I felt I could sustain. I measured my progress by the number of runners that I passed or passed me. For the most part I stayed with the same group throughout the race; at least it appeared that way to me. The defining part of the race, was just at the start of the Cat Hill section of the course. Another runner had come up on my right and I felt irked enough not to let this person pass. I thought of the Steve Prefontaine quote at this point. I decided I wanted to see who had enough guts to make it up this hill first. I started to really put in my first competitive hard effort since the Staten Island 6 hour run. It felt really good to hold this person of and in fact drop him before I got to the top of the hill.

At this point it wasn’t that much further to the finish line. I managed to drop my pace by 30 seconds per mile to 6:47 and finished the race strong. I wasn’t even winded when I crossed the line and stopped running, which let me know I still could have gone a lot harder. I didn’t want to push it though, my HR was at around 95% of max and I didn’t want to risk injury. I put in a good hard effort and took a good measurement of where I stand fitness wise. I learned that I still have a lot of work and fitness to recover, but I am not as bad as I feared I would be. I’ll be happy once I run my races in sub 7 minute miles.

Lap Time Lap Time HR Max Avg Min Dist min/mile
1. 0:07:38.2 0:07:38.2 168 169 157 116 1.008 7:36
2. 0:14:50.6 0:07:12.4 168 171 168 165 1.027 7:08
3. 0:22:12.6 0:07:22.0 171 172 170 167 1.021 7:15
4. 0:29:32.3 0:07:19.7 175 176 172 168 1.006 7:17
5. 0:36:25.9 0:06:53.6 179 179 176 174 1.018 6:47