Made it...barely

By Wednesday of last week, my back was feeling better (though not 100 percent), so I got out on the ol' track and blasted out eight 800-meter repeats with 400-meter jogs in between. My average time for those speed intervals was 3:01. I felt so good. So ready.

Thursday was my rest day and Friday was my final 10-mile pace run of the training program. I knocked it out of the park. It was so beautiful on Friday that I was positively grinning from the moment I stepped outside. Low 50s, no wind, cool and crisp air. I flew through the 10 - huge hills in Montclair and all - at a 6:30 pace. I was in heaven.

I wanted my final 20-mile run to be the icing on the cake, but that was not to be. The course was the same as the previous 20-miler, only in the reverse direction. This meant it was mostly downhill from Little Falls, through Fairfield, into Montville, for the first half; and uphill through the Caldwells, Verona and Cedar Grove, for the second. In addition, the wind was blowing from the east, and fiercely at that. Road signs were swinging in the wind like they were made of paper, and there I was, pushing up the four-mile long incline of Bloomfield Avenue from its start at Route 46 all the way to Fairview Avenue.

It did not help that I made the rookie mistake of starting out way too fast. This is what trips people up at the Boston Marathon, in which the first half is all downhill and the next several miles have tough hills, and I knew that. I saw it firsthand. Yet I could not help myself. The excitement of the first 10 miles had me get to the halfway point in 71 minutes. But it did not take a lot of time of running uphill into the wind to knock the vim right out of me.

By the time I reached the West Essex Trail, with less than five miles to go, I was barely the man I had been just an hour before, and the enormous hill on Lakeview Avenue, connecting Bowden Road to Ridge Road, drained me of everything I had left. The last three miles were a broken man's shuffle, leading to a second half of 84 minutes.

Averaged out, my pace for the entire run was 7:45 or so. This would have been A-OK if I had started and ended at that pace. But to start so fast and end so slowly is bad news. It means that I must remember to work on my control. Control will be everything at the Gansett Marathon, now just 16 days away.