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Thank you Dogfish Dave for re-focusing some of the training areas of my brain.

After much musing and a nagging curiousity that I could not put to rest, I went back to my heart rate data from yesterday's 10K Race in Squamish. I am a little curious that I spent the last 17 and a half minutes of the 10K ABOVE my average heart rate of 167 without going past my lactate threshold.

An analysis of my Polar S625X sampling data actually shows that I spent significantly more time at 176-178 that I had previously thought, almost a full ten minutes. And yet my breathing was pretty easy until I started to close in on 178-180, or about 90% of my maximum heart rate.

And I still had enough for a strong 200 metre kick at the end.

I SHOULD have bonked somewhere in there! And I can't come up with an answer that makes any real sense to me, why I didn't. Except perhaps for the plethora of five hour marathons I have been piling up in my mileage bank.

To me, the utterly unique thing is, that as I awake on the morning on the eve of my 46th birthday, I feel no ill effects whatsoever from yesterdays's effort. No muscle soreness or stiffness to speak of. NONE. It is a paradox.

And this after having basically run flat out after BALLOONING to a weight of 206 pounds, which has to have put me in the body fat percentage range of at least 24 0r 25%.

Some possibilities to ponder.

By running with my friend for the first five kilometres, I was completely relaxed. I think that has to be one of the keys. And our time at the 5K mark was 24:30 on the nose. At a steady pace I would have finished in around 49 minutes, but I was able to pick up the pace by a minute and a half over the last 5K. So, after a warm-up 5k, I ran a 22:55 final 5K.

My training for months now has emphasized the easy - NOT pounding and beating my body up week in and week out. I am always fully recovered, with none of the nagging aches and pains that plagued me after the Boston Marathon this spring.

I had been feeling some guilt and depression - actually a lot of guilt and depression - about putting on so much weight in the past three months.

But I was also determined to gorge on life as much as possible under the circumstances. It was kind of a Fuck You! to skin lesions and cancer and Efudex and Life and Death and my thumbing my nose at the Universe.

Rather than choosing one of of the following;

A. Running
B. Training
C. Moderation
D. Gluttony
E. Hedonism
or
F. Decadence

Instead I chose G.

Also known affectionately as all of the above.

Just because I am turning 46 tomorow don't think for an instance that I am any more mature than when I turned ten.