The quest for 1:59

At the end of the week, I'll run my first 800-meter track race in five years and just my third in the past 11. The dearth of recent attempts is not due to a lack of interest on my part.  In fact, I've tried to make "comebacks" nearly every year since graduating from college but have been thwarted by injury in all but one of those attempts.  Here's the rundown:

So, needless to say, I'm proceeding with caution this year.  I suppose as long as I don't end up looking like the photo below, I'll consider the season a success.

Just imagine how good-looking I was before this.

With that said, I still have high hopes for the season.  My goal is sub-2:00.  Let's call it a quest. I'd go so far as proclaiming it a Vision Quest, but one can only listen to Lunatic Fringe so many times.

A little history

The eager little 800 runner wearing
compression socks before they
were a thing.

In seventh grade, on my first day of middle school track practice, I was given a sheet that listed all of the track and field events.  I was to circle one or two of these, and those would be my events for the rest of the season.  As a 4’11”, 79 lb. 13-year-old (those are my actual measurements, forever preserved on the back of my 1994 little league card), I was ill-suited for pretty much everything besides the distance events – the 800 and mile. I could only choose one, and the mile seemed kind of long, so I chose the 800.  Little did I know that I’d be starting a relationship that would impact my life in many, many ways. (As just one example, I chose my college in part because I thought I could be a successful 800-meter runner there.  That choice led to me and my wife meeting as members of the track team.  Thank you, 800.)

As it turned out, I wasn’t very good at the 800, breaking 2:30 but once by the time I’d finished middle school.  Still, I was hooked, and when I started high school track (now 5’3” and 98 lbs!), I informed my coach that I was an “800 runner.”  Fortunately, he didn't check the veracity of this claim with my middle school coach and threw me right into the mix.  I struggled for a bit but had a mini breakthrough by the end of the season, running 2:11 in the last meet of the season.  [Historical Anecdote: At that meet, I told a friend that if I broke 2:11 I would ask out a particular girl in our class.  I ran 2:11.0 and was never more relieved in my life.  Had the girl known about it, I’m sure she would have been, too.]

I won’t bore you with every boring detail of my running history, so here's a quick summary.  In 10^th grade, I finally started growing into the chiseled physique I have today, and my times began to drop.  I ran 2:03 that year, then 1:59 in 11^th grade, and 1:56 as a senior.

College was full of ups and downs.  Actually, mostly downs, due to a series of injuries.  I ran 1:54 as a freshman and then didn’t run faster than that until senior year, when I had one final breakthrough, running 1:52. 

In case you were on the fence about my nerdiness, this is plot of my time from every 800 I ever ran,
with yearly averages marked by the red line.  

So, back to my goal for 2014

Between 1998 and 2003, I broke 2:00 in the 800 54 times.  In the 11 years since then, I have broken 2:00 ZERO times.  This drought has to end before it is too late.  The 800 is a fast-twitch muscle-dominated race, and, unless you’re Galoob or Gazelle, you lose fast-twitch muscle fibers as you age.  As I mentioned above, it’s not that I haven’t tried.  The one year I managed to race the 800 (2009), ended with a 2:00.22 at the Bay State Games.  Agonizingly close, but not good enough. 

This year, I’m embarking on yet another attempt at the barrier.  The plan is to run a minimum of three indoor meets - USATF-NE Masters this weekend, USATF-NE Open in February, and USATF Masters Nationals in March.  As for training, I’ve accumulated quite a library of workouts (see tab at top of blog), so it’s just a matter of choosing the right ones to prepare for these races. I’ll occasionally post in here a summary of my workouts and how I’m feeling (you care about my feelings, right?), and hopefully it will be a training methodology that works and that I can follow in future years when I try to do this again.  After all, I’m committed to this relationship with the 800, and we will only break up when my legs can no longer make it the whole half-mile around the track.  Stay tuned...