4 miles/40:54

The single biggest problem which Portland Fit has to deal with is bunching, the phenomenon of a clump of PFit runners entirely filling a track or pavement. This causes safety problems for everyone concerned, annoys other path users, and generally runs the risk of having PFit shut down because someone complains that this huge group of thousands of runners is taking over.

This year's innovation to try and combat this problem is to subdivide each pace group, so as a newly assigned yellow I saw my fellow runners heading off at a 9:00 mile pace, a 9:10 mile pace, and so on, the idea being that then there wouldn't be huge numbers of runners overtaking on the paths because everyone would be going at their proper pace in the first place.

My mistake, of course, was to set off with a group which was too fast for me. I don't know what possessed me to run with the 9:20 group, but I did. I think it was because I was chatting with someone and just set off at the same time he did. I almost managed to stick with them for the first mile and a half, but then I started to drop back. And drop back. And then even further back...

I finally finished with the 9:50 group, the runners I probably should have set off with in the first place given my time last Saturday and how tired I was, although I actually ran even slower than that group: about 10:14 per mile in the end.

Well, see how I do next week.

The group stretch and seminar afterwards were good though. I've had no knee pain either, although 4 miles is more or less my usual distance in any case so I would be surprised if there had been. I am a long way from springing gazelle-like along the path, however,

Posted by Dunx at April 10, 2004 01:48 PM