I figured if I trained for 1:50, I would have a bit of room to spare. Even if things didn’t go well, I could still break two hours.
At this point in my life, one of the things I liked about running was that I wasn’t very good at it. It’s rewarding to find out that you excel at something, and it’s fun and enriching to be a leader and carry some responsibility. But I discovered one of the reasons I liked running, at least at first, was because I didn’t feel any pressure to be the best or run at the front of the pack.
I run my own business. On family trips, I’m usually both the driver and the navigator. I’m a little competitive, so I feel the urge to win whether I’m at work, participating in a recreational sport or even playing board games with kids. I had a pretty good winning streak going in Horse-opoly before my wife pointed out that it might not be healthy for my step-daughter to lose every game.
But in my first marathon clinic, I was happy to fall in behind other more experienced runners during training runs. I was glad to be a follower and not a leader. There’s a lot less pressure in the middle of the pack.
As I was training for this half-marathon in particular, I felt especially happy to fall in line behind other runners. My father’s health was deteriorating, and I found running my only diversion from confronting the fact that he would soon be gone.
So when they asked for volunteers to lead the 1:50 pace group, I started looking at my feet. Unfortunately, the store manager was a friend, and when no one else put up a hand, he singled me out.
I told Jen, the clinic leader, that it felt wrong to be leading a pace group at a speed I had never run before. She reassured me that I would be fine. Besides, there was no one else to do it. I wasn’t even sure I could break two hours in a half-marathon and now I was leading the pace group that was supposed to go ten minutes faster than that.
I have a hard time saying no, so for the next few months, I led a small group of runners on their weekly long run. It went better than I expected. In fact, one day one of them gently complained that we were going too fast. Jen just happened to be nearby so she asked, “Still worried you can’t run fast enough?”
Maybe it was because after slogging through the winter training for a marathon, this time we were training during the summer for a fall event. Maybe it’s because I was a group leader and had no choice but to talk to the other runners. Either way, I discovered that I was enjoying the social aspect of the clinic a lot more. I got to know several of the runners and our runs together became something I looked forward to every week. My life consisted of going to work, visiting my father at his hospice and going for a run.
About ten days before the race, my father died. After the funeral, I decided there was no reason for me not to run the race I’d been training for. My aunt, who travelled from England for the funeral, offered to come out and cheer me on.
I told myself I would be very happy with anything between 1:50 and 1:55 and certainly wouldn’t be disappointed as long as I finished under two hours. But to my surprise, I managed to sustain a steady pace and finished in just over 1:44, much faster than I ever expected. Jen was right to believe I could go faster than I thought I could.
Not surprisingly, I liked the feeling of hitting a time goal and exceeding my expectations. It’s good to aim low to avoid the risk of disappointment. And there’s nothing wrong with trying not to put too much pressure on your running, especially if you’ve got other pressures in life.
But you also shouldn’t avoid the chance to live up to your potential. I’m glad I was pushed into running harder. It gave me the chance to surprise myself and the incentive to try to go even faster in the future.
The Beer Mile
iRun for beer Daryll Smith, Ontario
Canadian runners are not the favourites to win the Olympic marathon. No Canadian has won the Boston Marathon in a quarter of a century. And no Canadian has ever been the holder of the fastest recorded time in the mile.
But one Canadian runner has a stranglehold on the world record in another event: the Beer Mile.
What’s the Beer Mile? It’s as simple as this: A mile is roughly four laps of a standard 400-metre track. In the Beer Mile, you drink a can of beer before each lap. Four beers, four laps.
And Jim Finlayson, a two-time Canadian marathon champion, has done it faster than anyone in the world. You know the once-elusive four-minute mile? Finlayson, of Victoria, B.C., is closing in on the five-minute Beer Mile. Finlayson’s world record performance of 5:09 is more than half-a-minute faster than anyone else.
I know this for a fact: I couldn’t do one or the other in that time. Running a mile or drinking four beers would take me a lot longer than five minutes. Finlayson can do both. Not bad for a guy who stumbled upon the event only a couple of years before his world-record performance.
In 2005, Finlayson entered the Dave Smart Tribute Beer Mile, a fundraiser for a foundation named in honour of a Victoria triathlete who died at thirty-three of melanoma.
“I had no idea what to expect,” says Finlayson. “I entered for fun and I figured I would just go as hard as I could and see how it turned out.”
It turned out very well. Finlayson finished first with a time of 5:13, much faster than the world record of 5:40. But he drank his favourite beer, Guinness, which has a lower alcohol content than allowed in the rules, so his time wasn’t official.
(Yes, there are some very specific rules for the Beer Mile. Basically anything you can think of that would make it easier to chug beer when you’re out of breath – everything from light beer to wide-mouth bottles to shot-gunning – is prohibited. Oh, and you have to bring all the beer with you to the finish line. If you throw up, you run a penalty lap.)
“I was surprised at how well I was able to adapt to both parts of the race,” says Finlayson.
Event organizers encouraged him to race again the next year with an approved beer so that a world record could be set. But he didn’t decide to enter until the day of the race.
“I wasn’t planning on doing it,” he says. “But then I just couldn’t not give it a try.” So he stopped by the liquor store and picked up a six-pack.
“I asked the guy in the store, ‘What’s the closest thing to Guinness that has five per cent alcohol?’ He gave me Keeper’s Stout. I found it pretty fizzy, but it counted.”
Finlayson finished in 5:20 and set a new record.
In December 2007, he started thinking about another attempt.
“Two weeks before the race, I was really excited about it. But then I started having second thoughts. I was actually getting a bit nervous. What if it goes horribly wrong this year?”
Once again, it was a last-minute decision. After a practice run the night before with a new drink – Granville Island Winter Ale – Finlayson broke his own record in front of a field of more than seventy-five runners and a boisterous crowd of about a hundred people.
Finlayson says he’d like to take a crack at breaking five minutes. But even so, he has mixed feelings about being the world’s fastest Beer Miler.
“I feel good and I feel embarrassed at the same time,” he says. “There’s definitely some pride there. But having that beer label
