No, I didn’t skin any cats this go-’round at SCR,i that’d just be cruel and pointless, but I did manage to find some shall we say “efficiencies” around the track with a new, count-’em third mode of transport : my own two feet!
After a good few outings in Blackzilla and Dreidel over the last three summers, noticing that Jay’s in-house wrench Aran had his name on the leaderboard in the shop à pied of all the whack things, I couldn’t help but wonder how close your humble author (and his younger brother, also in tow on the day) could come to sprinting the 2.2km in Aran’s record-setting time of 8:16. Even though I run once or twice a week – outdoors with tarps-off in the summer and on the treadmill with tarps-on the other nine months of the year – I don’t run for outright speed. I run to get my heart rate up to 170 bpm or so, so that I can stay competitive on-court with kids half my age, and so that I don’t get fat. My younger brother Larry, what with the pending nuptials and all, is also in full-on athletic mode at the moment, so he was game to try the run too. In fact, it was his idea! Surely, a classic fraternal contest was brewing.
So it was that Larry went first and hammered out a time of 9:50. I figured that the benchmark for non-superhumans-like-Aran was 10 minutes so cracking that looked quite good indeed. Apparently Larry’s stumpy legs needed no lessons in propulsion. He always was an impressive sprinter!
Then it was my turn. After running 200m and having the shoelaces on my Chuck Taylor driving shoes come undone, forcing me to abort my maiden voyage avec un peu d’air sur terre, I walked back to the start-stop line for another go. Instead of trying the lap again with the achilles-punishing, slippery-laced All-Stars, I wedged my size 12s into Larry’s size 11 Nikes and gave it another go. Here’s the data from my run :
Bitch I still gots it!
I obviously wanted to die after the first 500m, largely because it was 29ºC with clear skies and 75% humidity and I never practise middle-distance running so I haven’t the faintest idea how to pace myself, but I pushed through for some reason, mostly the threat of sure embarrassment from my little brother beating me with his Johnny-Come-Lately-I’ll-Work-Out-On-My-Own-Terms attitude, but also because I was already on the far side of the track and I had to make it back to the paddock anyways.ii
As you can see from the data, with a total time of 8:53, all’s right with the world! Big bro is still on top in no small part because I found 400m of “efficiencies” to cut out of the 2.2km track without even touching the grass! After all, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and a straight line is a hell of a lot easier to find and maintain when you’re running 12 kph instead of driving 185 kph.
I might be getting older, but I can still keep up with the kids when I remember to strategise a bit and leverage my maturity a.k.a. “craftiness.” Hey, it seems to work for Tiger, y’know ? And he’s a cat too!
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- No cats were harmed in the making of this blog post even though the GT-R attracts cats like flies to shit! Even the track cats :
- FTR Moroccan Hicham El Guerrouj has the world records in the middle-distances with 1600m in 3:43.13 and 2000m in 4:44.96. Fuuuuuck! ↩