I'm not a happy camper tonight, but it has nothing to do with the home turmoil. I learned today that my online friend and mentor, Jim Fortner, known on RWOL as Jim2, lost his battle with cancer last Thursday at age 69. Jim had forgotten more about marathoning than most marathoners ever know, but he was never overbearing with his information or ideas. It was there, in his posts and his extremely informative website, and he helped me immensely. He's the one, for instance, that suggested I do a "spring training" of speedwork and training for short races instead of focusing on marathon training all the time. That, in fact, is what I'm doing right now, and my speed and confidence are immensely improved because of it. He also gave me confidence that I might actually be figuring this running thing out when he agreed with some ideas I posted on the MRT forum in the early days.
So, after learning of Jim's passing when I arrived home and logged on to RWOL, I liiked at Hudson's schedule. He had an extremely difficult "specific endurance" run tonight which I had never done before -- 8 X 1K at or near 10K pace with only brief recoveries. I wasn't sure I could pull it off, but I decided if Jim could be as brave as he was fighting cancer, I could HTFU and do a hard interval run. So off to JBH I went.
Warmed up for two laps, stretched some, then set out of the first interval. As usual, took me a bit to get my pacing bearings. Started out too quick on some, too slow on others. Paces for the intervals were 7:21, 7:21, 7:17, 7:23, 7:08, 7:21, 7:16 and 7:09. The range I had been shooting for was 7:15 to 7:25, so did a pretty good job of hitting those marks, and actually had to back off late on the 7:08 and 7:09 reps to get that slow. Then jogged home, which felt like I was crawling, except that it was low-9 pace.
I guess you could call this the Jim Fortner Memorial Tempo Run. Thanks, Jim. You helped me a ton, and you are already missed in our little corner of the virtual running world. | 