Mondays with Marty Late Bloomer 
Just yesterday, my friend Greg told me he likes to draw an imaginary circle around himself and every person with whom he has a relationship.
Speed. Strength. Endurance. You’ll need all three if you’re going to tackle the Keweenaw Trail Running Festival.
Tuesdays with Marty...? Yeah, I missed the deadline. Woke up yesterday morning with about four of them staring me in the face, thinking I could get them all done. Worked backwards, starting with the toughest and going on to the easiest. The column falls somewhere in between, which tells you that I missed more than one deadline.
Alas...
Of course, my days would be more wide open if I weren't coaching every afternoon, but come 2:30 I haul my lard ass out of the chair and drive down to practice. My distance runners are peaking right now, knowing that league championships are Friday, and post-season competition comes after that -- if they qualify.
There's the rub. I am benevolent dictator when I coach, cajoling and making inside jokes that nobody but me and the rest of the team understands (taken out of context they tend to strike one as either odd or wholly unfunny. Suffice to say that my wife doesn't see the humor in them), but when it comes this time of year I get just that little bit more edgy. My yell becomes a bark, and my inside jokes become very lame because I don't tell them in the voice of a benevolent dictator, but in the voice of a complete and utter dictator. No benevolence, no humor.
It has worked in the past, if only to bond the various runners against me in a display of communal loathing. But I'm struggling with that approach this year. I notice that my runners are not running to win right now, because that seems impossible against some of the state-ranked competition we will face on Friday. No, they are running so as not to fail.
Big difference.
When you run to win you do so without fear, a al Pre or Tecumseh ("live you life that fear of death can never enter your heart." Page 48 of The Training Ground, now available on Amazon.com). But when you run not to fail, your body gets tight and your posture rigid. You look over your shoulder, wondering who's gaining on you. Your strides chops prematurely as you doubt your inner metronome and begin to sense that pace might be a little too brisk, too soon.
OK, the obvious columnist leap: Life is like that. Too true, but I'm not gonna go there.
Let's just say that I reversed myself yesterday. We were doing 600 repeats in the midst of an insane spring heat wave. These were preceded by some easy warm-up 200s, which everyone ran too fast because they were fresh and tapering and rested, and so then proceeded to get giddy and think the rest of the workout would be a lark. But the 600's were a bitch, done progressively faster until we were down to race pace. There was no joy in Mudville as I called out the splits, even with the generous rest interval between each rep.
So I picked out the two who were having the hardest time and told them all the things I might do next week if they don't qualify for post-season competition: go to Mammoth, plan my anniversary trip, spend every afternoon from 2:30-5:30 at T Street, lounging in the sand. In short, I gave them an out. "I'll love you all just the same if you don't qualify," I told them. "And so will your parents." Then I went into the standard riff about not running to please parents or authority figures, and how they have to believe in themselves and be driven by their own passion, etc, etc.
Frankly, I'm not sure it had an impact. So my message today is no message. Sometimes life, like workouts, is very hard. And sometimes the goals you set for yourself in January don't seem so vital come late-April, if only because they seem so close but oh so elusive.
So let me tell you what I really think: yes, I will my runners just the same if they don't qualify. They are all blessedly wonderful young adults in my eyes, and when I call the girl runners "my little divas" they know it is an homage, not a slap in the face. So I want to see them succeed. I want to see them win. I want them to wake up Saturday morning and know they kicked some serious ass, and defied all their expectations and self-set limits. I want them to run so that the fear of getting caught will never enter their hearts.
And I don't want to go to Mammoth next week.
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