TVR upcoming

Each year, my friend Andy Roth puts on the Titus Van Rijn One-Hour Distance Classic, a challenge to run for one hour. The folks on his list get a time to attempt the challenge (a duration of about 6 weeks this time). The challenge is to run for one hour on a 1/4 mile or 400 meter track and report the distance. I don't know why it is named after Rembrandt's son. I don't know how long I have been participating in this but I do know that my participation started before 2006 when I set my personal record of 14,681 meters (and had to curl up on the bed for a couple of hours afterwards with an upset stomach).

For the past few years, the advent of this challenge is the incentive for me to get into shape. Usually I'm out of shape because of some injury. This year is no exception. I've had hip issues for years and I've been steadily working on them for over a year. I've had ITB issues for several months, possibly related to the hip issues. Due to TVR, I've been working on the ITB and it has been responding. And then just to make things interesting, in quick succession, I got food poisoning and then crashed my bicycle.

So the point of progress today is that this morning, I ran in the rough neighborhood of my target distance and my ITB didn't develop the usual pain. Hooray! So my rough plan (I keep the plans rough since they get changed often) is to get a representative effort completed on relatively flat trails (at Bolsa Chica Wetlands) midweek and another on a track on the weekend, then repeat this for the next 6 weeks which is the rough term of the challenge.

I'm slow at the moment. Really slow. However, I know that if I don't aggravate my injuries, I'll probably start improving my pace and see that on a weekly basis. And if not, I'm running a time trial weekly so I'll have something to enter. I've had bad years before and it didn't turn out to be a tragedy. If there is any consolation, it is (by comparison) how much worse I am at weightlifting now than when I was younger, yet I can still do it and get some enjoyment and improvement out of it.