Right, I gasped to myself. And you can pick up my lung when I cough it up.

It was my first “coached” running workout and a whirlwind of thoughts rushed through my oxygen-deprived brain as I did the third of my four prescribed 600-meter sprints (bookended by a pair of 1,000-meter dashes). Will I be seeing that tuna wrap I had for lunch again? was foremost. Why am I doing this? was a close second. By “this,” I meant hiring, at age 54, a coach to drive me, push me and to make my body feel like it hadn’t since I’d last crossed paths with a coach in high school some 35 years ago.

Quick background: Back in my 20s, I ran — a lot. Mostly 10Ks, about 30-35 miles a week. When I turned 30 my back and knees simultaneously quit; I turned to swimming, cycling and other less-pounding pursuits. Then, last fall, the bug to run, which had never entirely disappeared, surfaced when I started reading about where running was headed. Out were the days of long, meaningless training runs intended solely to rack up miles. Today, the smart runner runs less but makes every mile count. Less emphasis on long pounding runs, more on interval training. I was also inspired — as have been countless others — by “Born to Run,” which, among other things, repudiates the heel-strike movement of the ‘70s in favor of a running stride emphasizing a forefoot strike.

I enrolled in the Fit-tastic walk-to-run training program, which promises to take non-runners and make them capable of running a 5K in 12 weeks. My plan: Prove to myself that I can still run a 5k, then go back to cycling. After three months of training I figured my knees and back would renew their protest and force me back into less impact-insistent activities. Three months of knee and back cooperation, that was all I asked for. Then they could protest all they wanted.

Oddly, that didn’t happen.

In fact, I regained my dormant running form and did pretty well in my 5K return, finishing third in my age group in my first race. I kept running through the winter, upping my mileage. In April, I did a 12-mile trail race. Inspired, I enrolled in the Fast Coaching half marathon training program over the summer. On Labor Day weekend I exceeded my expectations, running the Virginia Beach Rock ‘n’ Roll Half Marathon in 1:45. I was happy, my knees and back were happy. What next? I thought.

The Second Empire Grand Prix 2010 Fall Series, it turned out. The series is a collection of eight races, ranging from the mile-long Magnificent Mile to the Anna’s Angels 10-miler. Most of the races, though, are 5ks, which set up the obvious scenario of trying to improve with each successive race. That meant doing a lot of the “smart” training, with long runs interspersed with intervals, that I’d been reading about. And that planted the seed of hiring Coach Tim.

Back in the ‘80s, Tim Clark was a competitive runner. He’d nearly broken the 15-minute barrier in the 5k, did 31 minutes and change in the 10K. Tim knew about effective training, and what he knew he’d been passing along to others for the last 15 years. (Tim had coached our Fit-tastic group.) And because Tim had been a competitive runner, he knew what it took to meet a goal: someone riding your butt, indifferent to the fact you were beet red, out of breath and about to come un-wrapped.

Coaching adults, even ones who are paying you, is no easy task. First and foremost, they are adults. They take grief daily on the job; they aren’t up for more, well intended as it may be, come playtime. The trick, then, is to be encouraging and demanding without coming off like a high school football coach. You don’t handle a sulking adult who balks at doing that last 400-meter interval by getting in their grill and questioning their manhood. Rather, you do what you would do with a challenging employee: you gently tell them they’re doing good, then throw in the “but” — “but you need to do better.” Especially if they hope to achieve this dubious goal of being 18 again.

At first, I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d hired Tim. Because everyone is doing it? (The American College of Sports Medicine says taking on a personal trainer/coach is one of the top 10 fitness trends for 2011.) I didn’t have long to mull it over; the first question Tim asked was, “What’s your goal? What are we shooting for here?” So I made one up on the spot: I want to break 21 minutes in a 5K. Tim created a workout routine aimed at helping me do just that. And that’s when I realized how Coach Tim differed from Coach Lucifer back at Gateway High: When you’re in high school, the coach gets you to do what he wants you to do. When you’re an adult, a coach helps you achieve what you want to do. Therein lies the danger of hiring a personal coach:

Be careful what you ask for — a coach will make you work for it.

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I’m in a much healthier coaching situation now. I listen because I know that no matter how painful six repeat 400-meter sprints up Washington Street bordering Fred Fletcher Park might be, or how goofy his “crazy feet” drill may seem, there’s a means to an end with what Tim Clark is putting us through.

Tim is 52, used to be a highly competitive runner. PR in the 5K: 15:01 (and he came in third, to give you an idea of the competitive circles he ran in), and 31:45 in the 10K (a race in which the winner was a good 3 minutes faster). You don’t get times like those by simply wracking up miles; You put some thought into how to make the best use of those miles. Which is where Tim comes in; He has us on a plan.

By “us,” I’m referring to the dozen or so in the Advanced Runners group in the Fit-tastic program run by The Athlete’s Foot in Raleigh. Fit-tastic started last fall with the goal of taking non-runners and training them to run a 5K in 12 weeks. There were about 80 runner-wannabes in that first session. This is the third Fit-tastic session, there are now 120 participants, and the program now caters to a variety of levels: from pure walkers, beginner walk-to-runners and intermediate walk-to-runners, to runners and advanced runners. I’m in the advanced runners group because I’ve been doing a six-mile trail run once a week for about a year. Plodding though that run may be, it puts me among the most experienced runners in the program. (And, again, none of us consider ourselves runners. Yet.)

“So, we’re going to do five repeats on this hill,” Tim told us at last night’s practice. (Thursdays, under Tim’s tutelage, are dedicated to hill sprints, Mondays to “strides.” On our own, we’re expected to do one 40-minute recovery run and on the weekend, a longer run, in my case the 6-mile trail run at Umstead.) We peered up Van Dyke Avenue: a steep initial climb of maybe 110 meters that disappeared over a rise.

“Where does it end?” someone asked.

“It ends up there … somewhere,” Tim replied. Hmm, run at 90 percent up a hill that we could tell was at least 110 meters, but be hiding another 400 meters beyond what could  be a false summit? How could you not follow a coach like that into battle? I found this somewhat amusing, certainly more than I would have in high school.

Three nights earlier Tim had led us on a two-mile warm-up run through a light drizzle. “Take your shoes and socks off,” he instructed as we came to a stop in a field of bent grass at St. Mary’s College. For the next 20 minutes or so we did what Tim called “strides” but which felt suspiciously like sprints on this lush carpet of wet grass. Running barefoot in grass was reward enough, the dew heightened our sense of feeling like kids playing tag in the backyard during an afternoon rain. We’d sprint — sorry, “stride” — for about 80 yards, recover for 20, stride another 80. All in wet, dewy grass. At one point I broke out laughing at the simple joy of it (something I don’t recall doing during my high school baseball days). Our strides were followed by a likewise barefoot session of “crazy feet,” in which we walked 10-yard stretches with our feet in a variety of odd positions.

“It helps build your calf and lower leg muscles,” Tim kept answering to the repeated question of, “Why are we doing this?” He added, “You might feel this one in the morning.” Boy howdy. My sore, knotted calf muscles threatened to rebel at the slightest provocation.

There’s no belittling, no berating. It doesn’t work on kids and it certainly doesn’t work with adults. There’s occasional cajoling and a white lie or two (“We don’t have that much farther to go …”). Mainly, there’s solid advice from someone who’s been there, someone who’s fine with the fact he isn’t there now (a bad meniscus tear four years ago and osteoarthritis have put Tim on a bike), someone who gets a true kick out of helping others try to reach their goals. Someone I wish my old baseball coach had met.

Tim is good. But is he good enough to get me to my goal of sub 8-minute miles at the Fit-tastic graduation, the 5K Monster Dash on Oct. 25? And don’t you like how I’ve shifted the responsibility of reaching my goal to the coach?

Coaches may change, but the coached?

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