 |
Sailing vs. Running |
 |
|
Sailing vs. Running |
|
Sheri
Bedford
11-18-00
Six months gone. Seven races run cold. Can a middle-aged woman
return to her winter home in Florida from a summer of sailing in Maine
to run with the same discipline and strength she had when she left?
Six miles seems like a long distance to me now in mid-November. In
late April, when I left, six miles was merely a routine workout.
After arriving in Maine, I tried to keep up my three runs a week.
April and May were cool, rainy months—good weather for running. But
being an undisciplined sort, I soon found myself nestled into warm
couch cushions instead of running. I needed the structure of an
external crowd to keep me going. So I got on the Internet and joined a
running group from MBNA, a national bank newly headquartered in
Camden. Donna Hurley, the trainer, was a 6-minute miler, locally
famous for winning masters overall awards for any race she entered.
"She’ll keep me moving," I thought.
However, I discovered that it requires as much dedication to run
with a group in rural Maine as it does to run alone. The challenge is
getting to the group. Nothing is close by. To reach my
Wednesday night and Saturday morning workouts, I had a 75-mile trek, a
one and a half hour drive over hill and dale on Route 1 (sometimes
behind 20 mile per hour drivers!) I tapped my fingers on the wheel and
mentally yelled at those slow drivers ahead of me…I agonized. Would
I make the workout in time? Or would the group have left without me?
The Lookout, MBNA’s fitness center, was situated on top of a
pine-forested hill overlooking Penobscot Bay. At 6:30 p.m., we would
jog out into the darkness of Route 1 to do eight or ten miles up steep
hills. It was slow work for me, but I thought maybe I was building
strength.
May was too gray and wet for sailing. I managed to log 68 miles for
that month (the most I would have as a monthly total for my entire six
month stay). It was due solely to the group that I even achieved that
level.
Then good sailing weather swept in. Weekly mileage declined.
June, July and August were all twenty mile months, punctuated by 5
or 10k races every two weeks, just for speed work. I never had time to
train for any of the seven races I competed in, so I ran them cold.
Instead of running intervals or tempo runs, I found myself crewing
on a seventy foot schooner, billowing down the coast to the Tall Ship
Parade in Boston, or gliding along in my own small sloop, gunkholing
around green pointy islands in Penobscot Bay.
My quandary was how to keep up a running regimen while on a 26-foot
sloop. Should I land on an island, jog over shale beaches and ledged
coastline? Why not hop nimbly at a 7-minute pace from boulder to
boulder?
How about doing laps of a deck? On a 70 foot schooner a runner
could probably do a couple hundred for a mile; on my little boat, one
thousand…if it were even possible on the one foot wide deck!
And how was I to keep a light running weight? Eating for warmth
makes it difficult to stay trim. Even though coastal Maine could
reach temperatures in the 80’s during that one week of high summer,
by late August, nights were brisk and I yearned for comfort food:
mashed potatoes with gravy; beef stew; creamy chowder; heavy, gooey
desserts, the hearty food of coastal sailors.
The result was I arrived back in Florida in mid-November after some
truly crisp Maine weather (including two inches of snow!), several
pounds heavier, many muscles weaker, but ready to start the serious
running season with the disciplined, trim, consistent Sarasota and
Bradenton runners.
I think I remember "guru" Runner’s World
affirming that people who have run consistently for a few years are
able to maintain their speed and fitness for long periods of time
without routine training. (But perhaps they were referring to a span
of 3 weeks as a "long time"—not 6 months!)
Have six months of sailing taken their toll? Upcoming half
marathons in December, January and February will tell if this
middle-aged woman is up to the challenge.