Spring is in the air! After rainy Thursday after rainy Thursday, the sun finally descended upon Central Park this past Thursday. And when the weather warms up, only one thing is on a runner’s mind… Boston. With the marathon fast approaching, that’s all anyone talked about before Tony arrived on the scene. And with several Boston veterans in attendance, everyone had an opinion on pacing, when to arrive in the corral, and even on how best to plan a pre-race run on the marathon course.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. While Boston is still a few weeks away, a big workout had to be run tonight. And when I say big, I mean big. We’re talking a hard effort of over 8 miles (five loops of the reservoir), the longest CPTC workout I’ve ever been a part of in my six plus years in the club. Fortunately, the first few laps were supposed to be slow (slower than marathon pace), as the workout mimics the famous ten-ten-ten approach to the marathon.

The good weather brought about good spirits from the CPTC faithful in attendance. Not even a later than usual start, or an obnoxious dog walker with 3 large dogs, could dampen the spirits of the approximately 56 runners in attendance. To minimize groups passing each other on the narrow reservoir path, the A group headed out first from the statue. Of course, due to an unforeseen bathroom break, the B group ended up starting the workout before the A group, causing mass confusion at the reservoir entrance.

Fortunately, things quickly settled down as the large 13 member A group started the first interval. Running in groups of four or five can be challenging on crowded the reservoir path, but amazingly, everyone did a good job sticking together. However, the famous runner’s rule of ‘the larger the group, the faster the pace’ definitely held true to form. While Eric Boucher announced before the first loop he wanted to run a 6:05 first mile, the pack came in more than ten seconds faster than that.

As the laps continued on (thanks to Stuart Calderwood for cheering us on) and darkness set in, the runners started dropping like flies. Even I begrudgingly stopped after four laps; my old and out of shape legs had had enough of barely holding on to the edge of the pack. But the advantage of dropping out early is that I got to saw Thom Little finish his last lap. Felice Kelly even commented ‘phew, glad he didn’t lap me’ after Thom completed the workout.

As a reward for finishing, we all got a nice present, a 40% off coupon at Niketown. And a well deserved reward it was! Most runners were too tired to run back to the statue, so we all slowly went our separate ways, presumably to go home and find out who Christian Cage would choose as his fourth teammate at Lethal Lockdown.