Running the Hills
Yesterday was the 40th running of the Cap 10K, in which 21,000 people all got together to run, walk, or otherwise traverse 6.22 miles of downtown Austin. I first ran it in 2011, and it's one my favorite races, mostly because it's so large. There's something special about participating in an event with so many other people. The sense of camaraderie and shared purpose is uplifting.
The first time I ran it was in 2011, about a year after my first 10K, which was the first running of the the Longhorn Run. We Longhorns ran through shady west campus, and the hardest part was the final hill, running up 23rd Street to the appropriately named Robert Dedman Drive. I felt nearly like a dead man approaching the crest of the hill, but the encouraging cheers of those that had already finished, and the thrill of running through the tunnel and onto the field at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium buoyed me. I was so excited about my accomplishment, that I wrote this account of my first time running farther than I thought I could.
Maybe running in a tutu and tiara helped my time, too. Photo credit: Nathan Gogo, KVUE Austin's weekend meteorologist, who did a live shot street interview with us right before the race.
A year later, after the Cap 10K, I was apparently dejected by my performance, finishing "only" about a minute faster than my Longhorn Run time. I had high expectations of myself, apparently. I didn't know then that it would be a general decline from there, running it a minute slower the next year, and another 7 minutes slower than that the year after. I was on my way up again last year at around the 1:02 mark, but it was this year that I felt like I was back, finishing a few seconds under an hour for the first time.
Why did I do better? I haven't been training as hard or running as often as I have in previous years. I'm running only once or twice a week now. This time, though, I was competing against the amazing, life-loving woman who beat me easily at the Brain Power 10K in September. At that race, she literally ran circles around me as I trudged along, and stood over me laughing when I lay down in the grass at the finish line, completely spent. She is just over 4 years my junior, and she has the ability to call me "old man" with laughter in her voice and a smile in her eyes and make me feel younger than I am. For the Cap 10K, she was running too. I got ahead of her at the start and imagined her at my back the entire time, pushing my pace the whole way. I ran my heart out, expecting her at any moment to blow past me laughing, saying, "Keep up, old man!"
I think the major difference, though, was not her presence, but my mental attitude. Running is always a mental challenge for me. A voice in my head tells me repeatedly that it would be ok to stop and walk for a bit, catch my breath, rest, then run again. If I walk once, though, I'm more likely to walk, then walk again. And for this race, there's the added mental challenge of the hills. The entire front half of the race is uphill, rising and rising. When you finish one hill, there's another, and when you think you've reached the last one, there's one more. Those hills have, over the years, become a huge mental obstacle for me. I talk about them when I talk about the race. I tell myself to conserve my energy through the flat stretches or the downhills so I can make it through the uphills.
This time, though, I focused on the downhill stretches. I pushed my pace through the flats, I tested my limits and kept breathing through the uphills, and on every downhill I released the brakes and used gravity to help me fly, slicing through the crowds ahead of me. Instead of dreading the next incline, I anticipated the freedom of letting go on each of the upcoming declines. The impact of focusing on the ease instead of the difficulty was that I achieved a time almost a full minute faster than my best Cap 10K, and only about 2 minutes short of my best official 10K overall, which was a much, much flatter course.
I'm happy with that.
Cap 10K was a glorious part of a wonderful weekend. I have many of those these days, wonderful weekends. I spent Saturday with family that I don't get to see often. My son connected with family that he misses. The food was good, the company was good, and my girlfriend was welcomed with open arms and much warmth. Sunday was the race, then brunch with family again, then a quiet and uplifting afternoon with that beautiful, laughing woman. We got coffee and strolled slowly through downtown. We stopped to look at Historical Marker #6450, a benign tale of a local store with not very much intrigue beyond the Prohibition-era saloon it housed in the back. We drank our coffee and ate mediocre cupcakes on a bench on the bank of Ladybird Lake, people watching and listening to a street preacher yell his sermon across the water to the ducks and kayakers and stand-up paddle boarders who appeared to pay him little mind. Then we strolled across the S. 1st Street Bridge and settled again on another bench near the Stevie Ray Vaughan statue. My companion was not familiar with him or his body of work and expressed with a smile the opinion that nobody knows who he is anyway, revealing herself to be much more of a New Yorker than an Austinite. We watched more people, and more dogs, and she rested her head on my shoulder, and I put my arms around her, and I was filled with a quiet brand of blissful joy.
That feeling never lasts, though. I know this. But I'm a new sort of person compared to the sort of person I was 5, and 10, and 15 years ago. I'm a person who looks forward to the downhills, now, instead of dreading the uphills. I use them to push forward, to up my speed enough that the slow stretches don't completely blow my pace overall. When the next uphill comes, and it will always come, I will think of the downhill that's coming after it, and the joy of letting go, of flying, and the sound of laughing voices calling out behind me, saying, "Wait up, old man!"
