#Reverb12 Day 6: Learning

For the month of December, I'm working on doing the daily series of Reverb prompts to help me reflect on the prior year and hope/plan for the upcoming year. If you're interested, join in; I found this to be a very useful exercise when I did it two years ago.

#reverb12 Day 6: What did you learn?

Compare the “you” from the beginning of 2012 to the “you” that you are now. What new skills or talents have you learned or discovered this year?

The biggest thing I learned in 2012 is not really described as a skill or a talent. 

You may have seen some articles months ago about a guy who plans to set a world record marathon by carrying weight while running in training (and training full time and believing in himself).  His thought is that when he later runs without the extra weight, he will go faster. 

I completely understand this thought process.  And maybe with the right amount of weight and/or the right athlete, it may be true.  He plans to wear a 40 pound weight vest. 

I also trained for months for a marathon while wearing at least 35 pounds of weight (actual vest weight was close to 40, but it always contained 35 pounds of weights). 

But I can definitively say that it did not make me run faster when I finally took off the weight. 

Unlike Mr. Call, I did wear the weight for my marathon (the Bataan Memorial Death March Marathon), but like Mr. Call, I believed with all my heart that as soon as I ran without that weight, I would be flying.  I expected I would be significantly faster than I had been before I began wearing the weight vest.

I was so wrong. 

Well, partially wrong I suppose. 

I took off the weight vest and I was flying.  I could feel how fast I was running and I was in awe.  All my thoughts about training with the vest had proven true.  While I ran more slowly with the vest, now that it was gone, I was running so fast.

Then I looked at my watch.

That only killed it for a minute.  I was sure my watch was wrong.  But then I got mile split after mile split and it was plainly evident that I FELT like I was flying, but in reality my pace was significantly slower than it had been before I started the whole endeavor.  I had lost a lot of cardio strength and my legs had become accustomed to a different stride with the vest. 

I'm not going to say that it won't be different for Mr. Call.  He plans to train to be able to run one mile with the vest at the pace necessary for his goal (which happens to be 4:34 per mile, or something equally crazy!).  And then he plans to build his miles from there.

That's not exactly what I did.  I didn't have a goal pace, I just wanted to run hard wearing the vest and be able to finish the race.  That hard effort pace was slower than my no-weight-vest pace.  But yes, I was able to run one mile with the vest significantly faster than I ran 26.2 miles with the weight.  Maybe if I'd pushed myself for months? years? to get to the point where my weight vest pace matched my pre-weight-vest pace, it would have been true.  Maybe if I'd worn the weight vest only for a couple months instead of 4 months, it would have been true (but actually, I doubt that, it would take much longer than a couple months to get to run a pre-weight-vest pace with a vest). 

But the biggest thing I learned in 2012 was that training for 4 months with a weight vest did not allow for a speedy return to my original pace when I took off the vest.  In fact, it was a long and painful process to get back to my original pace -- and now a year after I first started running with a vest, I'm still hovering around my original pace and I have not yet gotten any faster.  It took me a full 6 months without the vest to get back to my pre-vest pace. 

A kind of disappointing thing to learn in 2012, but of course I wouldn't trade it. 

I had fun running with new people at a slower pace when I wore the vest.  The running program that I use has people at all different paces and I have yet to find a group I didn't like (well, that's not entirely true, one year I had a "coach" who wasn't much of a coach (had never run a full) and she wasn't much of a conversationalist either, that year hurt, but all others have been great).  So I got to meet new people.  I got to challenge my body in a different way.  I ended up having a great marathon result.  I learned that an endurance kind of event like that is something I enjoy and am pretty good at.  And losing a year of improvement isn't the end of the world.  I just need to work hard to get faster, and 2013 will be the year, I'm determined!