Wowie Zowie, I took 4 consecutive days off this week, the most I’ve taken off in the last 8 months and, as it happens, it wasn’t any big deal and I did not automatically quit running forever because of it. Additionally, my idiotic fear that a month full of easy runs might eventually slow me down to a paralytic crawl was also happily off base.

Today I enjoyed a most fabulous 10-miler at HM pace, with an additional treat at mile 7. That’s where I first passed a 20-something chick in a maroon shirt, going the other way. After I made the turnaround at my halfway point, the chick became more than an annoyingly cute girl – she was my prey. When I finally caught up and passed her (making sure to breathe real quiet so she wouldn’t hear me gasping for air) it made me feel so mean and happy at the same time, I loved it.

Which reminds me of my very first tempo run back in May. I was scared to ramp it up for the first time, to see what “comfortably hard” meant. I had a pervading worry that if I went too fast, I’d have to cut the entire run short (fate worse than death), so it was with trepidation I got myself up to a rocking (for me at that time) 9:07 for 3 miles. Twas a huge thrill when it was over and I wasn’t dead.

But a mere one week later, I was attempting my second tempo run, hoping for a few seconds faster at the most, when something amazing happened. Appearing in my view like an apple for picking, or rather, a carrot dangling in front of my face – was a guy in an orange shirt. This was to be my first brush with the human carrot phenomenon.

I didn’t know until that day, that when a lone runner is in front of you, innocently doing his thing, it is possible to catch and pass this unsuspecting creature, rendering him helpless to your omnipotent gargantuan speediness, at least until he gives a shit and passes you back. So I chased the guy and ended up with an 8:49 tempo pace, making the previous week’s perception of “comfortably hard”, more like “uncomfortably comfortable”.

And that, my friends, was a massively important discovery for me. To think, that if I hadn’t been chasing someone, I never would have known I had a whole other set of gears available to me. It was like receiving a gift of a sizable chunk of seconds, all because I was shown it was possible.

It’s such an overused aphorism, but Henry Ford said it perfectly; “whether you think you can or can’t, you’re right”. Once you exceed your expectations, you realize that nothing is as cut and dried as it seems, that there’s always the possibility of more. Thrilling stuff.

So eat your carrots, pounce on them, gnaw, chew, swallow and spit them out till they don’t know what hit them. It’s ok – after all, you’re someone’s carrot, too.

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