Nick Dahl is one of Pennsylvania's top distance runners. The Germantown Friends' School junior blogged about his training during the fall for MileSplit. Now he returns this winter for a journal entry about his indoor campaign for PennTrackXC. Dahl has been busy since finishing up his cross country season, traveling to Vietnam and beyond. He returned to drop a pair of PA#1s (one with a relay and one individually) up at the Yale Track Classic. Dahl takes us through his training from the end of XC until his races at Yale, chronicling the ups and downs along the way. Here's Dahl's first entry of the season for us!
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There's no such thing as bad weather, only improper clothing. A harsh lesson we all learn again as winter begins, when the days get shorter and the runs get colder. This is indoor track season, the time of year where every other type of athlete scurries inside for shelter, sticking to the heated interior of a gymnasium. But not runners. No, we prefer to stick it out on the trails until the bitter end, and when they are no longer an option we move to sidewalks and plowed streets. There's not much to be said behind our motives other than "we'll be faster in the spring" and the lasting knowledge that treadmills just aren't worth it. This is the season that defines the rest of the year through June, and athletes know that eventually, some day in the future, they will be glad they took their gloves off of the heater and braved the elements for an afternoon of intervals. This is the season that leaves toes numb and ankles dry, and fingers so clumsy that they can't untie tight knots on a pair of spikes. This is the season of 200 meter tracks, hairpin turns, and competition so fierce, you'll be begging for the wide open spaces of cross-country by the time next season rolls around, desperate for some space to stretch out your legs.
This is indoor track, and I couldn't be more excited.
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My team, Germantown Friends School, had a long and winding road to make it to our first major week of competition at the Yale Track Classic. Immediately following the end of cross-country season at NXN Northeast, we all took two weeks off, to hit the reset button physiologically. The season had been a great one, but some finished at that last meet with a bad taste in their mouth, myself included, and all we wanted to do was get back to the regularity of training.
The effects of not running were almost immediate, and I could feel this crazy internal need to burn energy without a means to do so. After a week of absolutely no running, we began doing a recovery run every other afternoon, and they became my most covetable moments of the whole day. The efforts were almost cruel in their shortened length, and although I knew that my body really needed the rest to return to full strength, there was nothing I wanted to do more than hit the trails for a few strong miles in a moderate effort. But the time did pass eventually, and before I knew it, we were right back in the swing of things, picking up the work we put down so long ago at the conclusion of last year's track season.
Dahl racing the mile leg of the DMR at Yale (Photo by Steve Mazzone)
Family vacation means some variety in runs, like this one in Phnom Penh
But between me and that first race, there would stand several obstacles. First came winter break, where my family and I went on vacation to the other side of the world, travelling through Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand over two weeks. I knew that getting in my runs while I stayed in unfamiliar places would be a challenge, but it was one that I was incredibly excited to take on.
We started the break in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), the capital city of Vietnam. We found it was overrun daily by a wave of bikers and motorcycles, so I knew that if I had any chance of completing my runs on pace, it would have to be early in the morning, before the city even woke up. I found the largest public park, mere blocks from the small hotel we were staying in, and I did all of my runs there, circling the few available blocks not absolutely crushed by pedestrians and vehicles. It was a gorgeous way to get my miles in, and although I didn't have many choices as to where I could go, the scenery and people around me changed every day and kept it interesting.
(Left) Watching the sun come over the temple as I ran around Angkor Wat; (Right) Climbing through a temple being reclaimed by nature
Next on my family's itinerary was Cambodia, travelling between both Phnom Penh, the capital city, and Siem Reap, the city directly next to Angkor Wat. Again, it was just me, my GPS watch, and whatever map I could get my hands on in the mornings before the city would wake up, navigating foreign streets covered in signs I couldn't read and people I couldn't understand.
Thailand's Summer Palace
The story was no different once we arrived in Bangkok, the final city we would stay in. A glass of bad water and a stomach virus bad enough to knock my weight down a few pounds kept me out of commission for two days, but those would prove to be the only casualties of the vacation, and my training stayed as strong as ever in the 95 degree weather before we came back to Philadelphia on January 1st. There's no better way to spend New Year's Eve than flying backwards through 12 different time zones, experiencing midnight again and again every hour as we made our way around the globe and back home.
Now, the team regrouped and took on two full weeks of training for the big weekend of competition. Our school, Germantown Friends, does something unique, in which every junior is given the month of January to pursue an internship off-campus for four weeks. I chose to spend mine here in Philadelphia, at a company called Invisible Sentinel. While this new experience was a great way for me to learn more, it also meant that I would be doing a lot more runs on my own, out in the cold, either before the day began way early in the morning, or in the evening after work finished. Neither choice was ideal, but I made it work, combining morning and night runs to get everything done.
The one workout from these two weeks that really stuck with me was a set of 8x400 on January 5th, progressively getting faster and faster with the same time of recovery as I descended from 1600 race pace to 800 race pace. My job had taken me way late into the night, and I got out long after the sun had set, so I jogged over to the Franklin Field track, laced up my spikes under the few floodlights that were still on, and began the work. After opening up in 63.4 and 62.0 for my first two, I could already see the steam rising off of my head in the cold wintery night. The setting was almost surreal for me, looking around at the empty stadium seats which only a few months ago I had seen packed to the brim with screaming fans at Penn Relays. Now, where tens of thousands of athletes and spectators had been stood were just empty bleachers. My remaining next six pieces went over well, and I split 61.7, 60.5, 60.0, 60.0, 58.9, and 58.4 to close out the night. My hands were too cold to untie my spikes once I got back to my sports bag, so I jogged around, shaking them out until I could get my shoes off of my feet. Whenever I could, I would take the train to school to join the rest of my teammates in a run, but they were rare opportunities.
The next day, we came back to the track, finding exactly as much success in our second day of competition. We were all still feeling the previous day's races, but that didn't stop us from running some of the fastest times in the nation. I ran a hard-fought 3,000m race against some of the nation's finest, finishing in a US #8 time of 8:39.71, but the true heroes of the day were our shorter distance athletes. Sarah Walker took home the meet win in a US #2 time of 2:12.21, and Grayson Hepp ran a lifetime best and school record of 1:55.50, which earned with #2 in PA and #8 in the nation as well (he was second in the meet). To cap it all off, we ran another school record time in the 4x400 of 3:31.64 later that evening, an exclamation point on the sentence of our weekend performance. We went home, victorious, celebrating the great start to our season and excited for everything that there is still to come.
On the girls' side for GFS, Sarah Walker cruised to victory in the 800 meters (Photo by Lisa Romanchick)
