Closure

To the few people that read this blog, I apologize once again for the delays between posts. I'm afraid my reasons for not posting sooner are silly at best- I actually had posts written and saved on my computer, but often they were written a week or more after the race in question, and so I felt that I should also be posting up-to-date material in addition to back posts. But it's time to clear the backlog and finally post some content, so I'm posting four separate compositions today, with this one focusing on the CIS Cross Country championships and the big picture. Scroll further down for my OUA recap and the races that preceded it. 

Having met the athletic department's official standards for qualifying to the CIS meet for the first time (top 20 at OUA's), I was granted permission to fly into Pearson Airport Friday afternoon where Kevin would then pick me up and drive me the rest of the way to London.  

With my flight being delayed while on the runway for half an hour, I expected that we would be late for the banquet but hoped there would still be food to eat. As it turned out, Kevin and I arrived just before our table had been called up to the buffet table. I'll just make one comment about the banquet food as it's not my aim to call people out on this blog: at $40 a ticket, having the food run out after just one plate per person was a huge disappointment. Many of us sampled various things and expected to go back after for the bulk of our meal, but this was thwarted when kitchen staff told us no more trays would be brought out.

Food aside, the banquet was highlighted by appearances and speeches by the 1963 McMaster Marauders, who took the first men's CIS championship, as well as the women's champion Western Mustangs from 30 years ago. When one of the speakers from McMaster spoke of the course, where a 4 metre fence in the middle of a farmer's field had to be scaled, the hall cracked up. While I wouldn't want tall fences to be the norm on cross country courses, I'd love to at least see some hay bales that we'd have to hop over. Alas, Western is a finely manicured, well draining golf course with no hay bales in sight. But at least it has some hills. 

At the end of the banquet, everyone simply filed out to head back to their hotels. Unlike past years, I don't think I had a single conversation with runners from other teams, but instead was treated to "Individuals to Watch" and the CIS top 10 ranked teams, as if no one in the hall knew. To be frank, this sort of filler was why the banquet was better left after the race, when teams would be in full party mode and people would spend much of the dinner mingling between individual and team awards announcements.

 
Regardless, I had not travelled from Ottawa just to enjoy a banquet- I was there to race. A trip to the grocery store ensured I wouldn't be hungry that evening, and with all the variables that I could control now in my favour, I slept soundly that night.

Race morning was unremarkable except for how I felt: despite being the last race of my cross country career at Waterloo, I was not super nervous. Yet sitting in the back of my mind were my poor performances of the previous two years. I didn't need to be a CIS all-star to be satisfied, but I certainly didn't want to choke. My personal goal was top 50, though I obviously wanted to be as far under that goal as possible.

With the girls on course, we started our warm up. While I've written extensively of my own injuries, it should be noted that as a team we were quite banged up this season. Based on what I knew (and I'm sure there was more I didn't hear about), most of our sqaud had been banged up at some point, but of greater concern were the injury issues Dan, Charly, and Devon were having prior to the championship. How well would everyone hold up over 10k?

Once we returned and I had run through my drills, I started to have digestive issues. A pit stop seemed to settle things, and before I knew it my spikes were on...yet they did not feel right. My feet were hurting, so I scrambled to untie them both and shake out some residual dirt that had escaped my cleansing efforts post-OUA's.

With all of us ready to go, we huddled up the field from the start line for pre-race chant. Nothing particularly memorable was said by myself or anyone else around the circle, but we did our best to talk ourselves up, chanted, then headed back to the line. For Devon, Justin and myself, this had been a four year wait to finally race as a team at CI's. It felt good to have six of my own teammates in our own box surrounding me instead of other individual qualifiers as in previous years. 

From the crack of the gun, things felt fast. Maybe it was our starting box, way on the left side in box #2. Or maybe the field simply went out harder than I expected. Regardless, as a team we somehow ended up at the back of the field, but I did not realize this until multiple people confirmed such after the race. I figured we were near the back, but video evidence says we were right at the back. One thing was clear to me at the time however: I would have a lot of moving to do as the race played out to finish where I wanted.

Because I was leading the Waterloo team except for portions of the first kilometre, I didn't know what was going on with the guys behind me. Looking at the race footage afterwards showed me that Michael and Charly weren't too far behind me at all, and as I moved through the field were we were also moving up as a team man-for-man. One thing that I remember thinking with surprise during the race was how many guys from Laurier I had to pass on the first lap. In previous races there might have been one or two who went out ahead of our top four, but that afternoon I had to catch most of their team, and never even saw Soh Ikram, who had gone out hard and would eventually hold on to finish a stellar 27th. At the time I didn't give this much thought, and truth be told wasn't thinking about much at all except moving up to the next group ahead. 

Passing through 5k, I took a glance at the clock and was shocked. I had only run 16:27 for the first half of the race, when judging by the effort level I was certain I had covered the distance much quicker than that. Cross country is about placing first and foremost, but going into the race I was fairly confident I would (and would have to) run under 33 minutes to achieve my goal. Based on how I was feeling at that point, I knew negative splitting the second half was not in the cards- it was just a matter of picking off as many guys as I could and putting the time out of my mind. 

I continued to bring guys back in the next two kilometres, and was confident that I would finish well enough to avoid the “choke” label. But after closing on many of the guys who were within immediate striking distance by 7.5k, I struggled mentally with leading the group while trying to catch another pack up ahead. I was caught by surprise when Charly pulled up beside me and then started to pull away. Given how Charly's hip had been bothering him in the weeks prior, I will fully admit I didn't expect an amazing performance out of him, but held out hope for the team's sake that he'd still run well and score low for us. 

I'd like to say watching Charly pass stoked some sort of fire inside of me that shook off the rough patch I was in at that point. But the truth is a part of my brain resigned to finishing as Waterloo's second scorer, wherever that would have put me in race overall. But my body had other plans and I managed to keep the distance from growing after that, and eventually closed and tried to work with him as we approached the final kilometre. 

On the long straight to the finish, I was waiting 500m mark, spray painted in white on the ground, to throw myself further into the hurt box. When we reached it, I accelerated and caught up to Dave Cashin of Queen's, and then kept on kicking by him. I also passed a guy from Victoria, but to his credit he came right back up on me in the final 100 metres, and though I attempted to match his strides, it was in vain. I had finished 43rd overall, and 23rd OUA competitor.  I would not call it a performance on the same level as the one I had at OUA's, but I couldn't have been happier: I had finally run decently at the CIS meet in my third attempt, and I completed my season without having a down race. The most disappointing part of the weekend was learning that our cross-town “rivals”, the Laurier Golden Hawks, had beaten us by 7 points to finish 12th overall. This was despite  gaining over 60 points on them collectively as a team in the 2nd half of the race (I myself gained 22 places in the second half). This is the first time in my memory that we have lost to Laurier at a championship meet where both of our teams were competing. Full credit to Laurier for executing on the day. On a happier note, the Warrior women finished a fantastic 10th! I hope the Waterloo athletic department uses their finish as justification to send more teams on the bubble in the future.  

Some reflection….

When I started this blog after spring exams, my aim was to use it to chronicle my build up to the university cross country season, with the major goal of running at my third CIS meet. From the beginning, it was almost as if the blog acted as jinx; I battled injuries right from the first week back running post-exams and this continued through August. In a bit of cruel irony, a blog christened "Building the Base" instead served to document a summer where I never managed to run enough to build one. I've heard it said that a happy life makes for a crappy blog. This does not hold true for me. For someone who chose to start a blog about running, not being able to train properly was quite a buzzkill, and I got tired of writing about any injuries that crept up, so I often didn't compose anything at all. I'm hoping that this post can make up for that a little bit, by going into detail about how despite the setbacks, I had my best university cross country season.

If I had to pick a key moment during the months I spent training this fall, I would zero in on the morning of the 6th of September. I had been struggling with pain in my left forefoot for almost 2 weeks, and was frustrated to discover that each time I took time off the pain would return when I commenced running for more than a few days. This was especially disheartening because prior to this period I had begun using a foot pad after a trip to the pedorthist in mid-August. The foot pad took some of the pressure off my metatarsals and the improvement was immediate in the week after, but after gluing it down to the bottom of my insole (as I had been advised once I discovered the sweet spot for the pad's placement), I found the pain had returned. 

Unlike when I first encountered this type of pain in my foot, I am no longer concerned it is a stress fracture as I was 2 years ago. But running while my forefoot is screaming in protest is neither enjoyable nor a guarantee that I won't induce damage to the bones in my foot if I continue for significant periods of time. A summer of trying to manage the injury was ultimately unsuccessful. 

On that morning in September, I was fed up. Nearly two weeks of on-again off-again training where the pain had not improved had wasted my patience, and left me resigned to try and run through it. If I wanted a shot at running well in late October and early November, I needed to start putting in the miles sometime. And so I put on the shoes and headed out the door. 

I was in pain after only 3 minutes. Stopping at a bench along my morning route, I took off my left shoe, readjusted the insole, and considered my options. I could see the run through and likely be hurting the rest of the day, or turn around and walk home, then rinse and repeat the following day. Well…what did I have to lose? I tied up my shoe, jotted across the street to the bicycle pathway that runs along the Ottawa River, and continued. 

Something special happened during that run. Though I was gritting my teeth for the first couple minutes after resuming, by the turnaround point I was feeling better. At the end of the run my foot felt better than when I had started. And while I certainly wasn't pain free, I ran again in the afternoon. The next day I was in pain but it never worsened, and I soon found that alternating between two pairs of shoes that on their own caused my feet to hurt seemed to find a happy medium when I wore one pair in the morning and another in the evening. 

I'm not sure how the season would have gone if I had decided to turn back that morning. It wasn't as if my injury problems ended with that run- I had issues with my hamstrings, quads, and Achilles as I have mentioned in previous posts. But all of those resulted because I was finally able to run enough to beat my body up once my metatarsals settled down. After that morning, I was able to look past the next day in deciding how to train. 

Sport commentators often like to throw around the term "veteran experience" to describe the advantages a team or individual will have as a result of having competed at an event before, or experienced a type of training or preparation in the lead up. While I think more often than not experience in sporting events is over-rated (how many Kenyans get more than one shot at the Olympics given how competitive it is to make their team?), I found that the lessons I have learned over my four years running at Waterloo paid dividends this fall in how I handled injuries, planned my training, prepared mentally, and executed in races. 

When it comes to any niggles I have encountered in training, I have tended to favour a run-through approach over taking time off. In the case of my foot this fall, this turned out to be the right approach, especially since I had already tried taking time off. For other injuries, however, I have learned that one voluntary day off when something more than soreness has crept up can save me half a week or more of forced missed training. How do I know this? Each of the ailments I had this fall were something I had encountered before, the only difference in some cases being they were on the opposite side of the body. A strain in my vastus medialis two years ago had me completely baffled and scared as I could barely climb stairs, and I can recall sending panicked emails to then Waterloo coach Stephen Drew where I vented about losing fitness.  When the same affliction hit me this past September, I took one day completely off (struggling to walk), was riding a bike on the second, ellipticaling by the fourth, and racing on the sixth day after. My cross training likely limited any fitness losses (maybe even provided some gains) and allowed me to get rolling again, and I didn't sweat the lost miles. Other issues, like my sore Achilles tendons, were treated pre-emptively knowing they were likely to cause me problems based on past experience. I haven't had Achilles problems in a couple months now, but I continued to do the heel drops as a pre-emptive measure throughout the season and never missed a day because of them (again a departure from 2 years ago). 

When it came to planning out my training this fall, a major difference from when I was training alone in Peterborough was that this time I looked as solo workouts as an advantage for me, especially given my perceived lack of fitness. Rather than being thrashed at paces quicker than I could handle in the early season, I was left in complete control of my own destiny- if something felt too hard, I ran slower, and on the days when I felt good, I could open up the throttle with no one complaining. It also saved me from comparing myself to anyone; last fall I found that too often I would run a workout with the Mac team and then say to myself "well, I kept up with -insert name here- today, so I should be able to run with them in races", even though I have always firmly believed that that principle doesn't hold up very well. I was also able to plan my workouts around my schedule- when I was working at Dofasco last fall and had to put in extra hours, I found it hard to show up halfway through a workout at Mac and jump in. In Ottawa, if I had to workout alone in the dark, I would, but I wouldn't miss any intervals as a result. 

Coupled with my new attitude towards training was an altered planning process, where I actually planned my training by counting back from races and scheduling in sessions that I felt I needed. As an example, because of my lack of base mileage, I felt my endurance needed work, so right away I adopted the Sunday long run-Wedesday medium distance run concept championed by Mark Wetmore in Running with the Buffaloes, gradually increasing both over the course of the season until 1 week out from OUA's. 

Belief in my own training and my confidence in handling injuries was critical to my mental preparation before races this fall, where my expectations after the summer were tapered but I remained focused on the task at hand. I did my best to put things out of my mind before races (whether it was stress from work or other life concerns) and set realistic expectations for how I might run on a certain day. Despite having the thoughts of previous dismal performances sitting in the back of my head before CI’s, I did not crack under the pressure and ran decent. At both the fist and last meets,  I set realistic goals  and executed accordingly. 

Now after reading all of this you might very well be asking yourself "okay tough guy, so how come you only finished 43rd at CI's if everything went so great?" It's something I've thought about as well, and truth be told, I think I'd finish higher than I did this year if I'd run as well in previous seasons, but outside of that, I'm a firm believer if performing relative to the talent you're given with. I'm under no illusion that I'm some great runner. But the best part of running is your own personal improvement. I'm not going to be a world-beater, but I was much fitter this year than I've been before, and I have the results to back it up. After taking a week off (it wasn't really planned, but mentally I checked out), I'm ready to gear up again in preparation for track. I'm very curious to see what I can do this winter, where I hope to commit to racing every meet during the indoor for the first time.