Dedicated to Aging Runners Everywhere

This is about aging. For most people, age creeps up slowly and then socks you in the jaw when you go to the doctor and she tells you that your blood pressure is on the high side, your bones are getting a little porous, you gotta start popping a baby aspirin every day or you’ll get a heart attack.

And there are the every-day things like a little less hair, a little more paunch, the minor aches and pains that take longer to get rid of. Loosening flaps of skin, etc. It doesn’t happen overnight.

But there is a more precise gauge to aging that we runners battle constantly—it’s called the clock. Race times elongate, even with a similar or greater effort. That’s how I’m living a lie. I am a trim 5’ll’’, 158 pounds with fairly lean body mass, very little gray hair and people say I could pass for someone 20 years younger than my true age. But the other day I completed a 16-mile trail race and I was totally wasted. The same race I finished in a little over two hours two years ago took me two-and-a-half yesterday.

           

But that’s just part of the story. I had no stamina, walked for significant portions of the race, and reached my maximum aerobic threshold at a mere trot. A few short years ago I would have breezed through that course, but, baby, the elements of age, gravity, and the tick…tick…tick don’t lie.

Runners can’t hide from the truth. The truth will leave them panting and puking in the bushes. It was a disheartening Sunday, or so I thought.

           

Found out the next day that for the first time in my life I finished FIRST in my age group. And it happened in that awful, miserable race. Of course my age group consisted of only three male individuals, most likely experiencing the same deteriorating physical calamities that are encroaching upon my well-being.

Given the paucity of participants in my age group, my conclusion is that some races are simply a younger man’s game. I will not, and cannot, capitulate to that thesis because, as previously noted, I run not only to eat, but also to cheat age and death.

Yet death seems so present at certain stages of certain runs. The psychology of running is a bit knotty from my standpoint. I’ve never quite experienced the so-called joy of running and distrust those who insist that it is inherently playful and rewarding. Maybe for the young sprinters and steeplechasers.

But for us long-run sloggers, the joy is in the accomplishment, not necessarily in the process. Runner’s high? Who’s kidding whom? If I run 10 miles today, I can eat a sausage pizza tonight. That’s what running means to me. Plus the envious stares from my MD and the lady at the blood bank who makes me walk around the room a few times to get my resting pulse rate up high enough to fill a bag with healthy runner’s blood.

           

That, and once every 15 years finishing first in my age group. Maybe I am not a good running ambassador. How’s this: running isn’t heaps of wonderful for what it is, but for what it does.