Running "Old"

I wake up a few minutes before the alarm goes off. I swing out of bed to start turn on the heat and get the coffee going. My wife snores softly still burrowed down deep in sleep-ville. As I stand up I can feel my back. It's tightened up over the night. My right achilles has been bothering me so I inserted extra lifts in each shoe during my 90 minute run yesterday. Now I pay the price. Not for the 90 minutes but for the two inserts. It throws my stride off just a nano-nth but enough to cause back problems. My achilles feels better and is only slightly tight. My left knee is mildly sore. That has been ongoing for the past month.

As I stagger into the kitchen I bump against the table and I feel a sharp pain shoot up from my hips.

I keep moving. The pain passes. I am already thinking Advil.

There is one thing I know. I ran yesterday and I will run tomorrow. This is what it is to run old. I know that. I am 62 and it's not going to get better unless I stop.

Somewhere during the thousands of miles I have run since 1968, my 30 year, 60,000 mile warranty expired.

You're on your own now.

That was about 25 to 30,000 miles ago.

It's like another old runner said to me. It's not what it used to be but I am not ready to give it up.

I get that.

I am running out of secrets though. Those little adjustments that I have made that have kept me running way beyond most of my peers from the old days when we were all fast and capable of running day after day, 8, 10, 12, 15 miles a day. I ran 60-70 miles per week. Sometimes more. Others ran up to that magic barrier.

One hundred miles a week.

These days I run the same. 60 to 70 miles but it's over two weeks and if I am really beat, it may take me 3 weeks.

A friend of mine said mentioned recently that he could no longer break 26 minutes for 5K. I asked him how much he ran in a week. This to a guy who often run 70-80 miles per week. Turns out he ran 40-45 minutes 3 times a week and one day he ran for a half hour. Maybe 15-18 miles a week. He used to do that for a long run on Sundays back in the day.

You won't break 26 minutes on 15 miles a week, I said. You need to run more. Maybe 25-30 a week and even then you might not do it. I could see that look on his face. He was comfortable doing what he did. He came up with a dozen reason why he could no longer run that many miles.

25-30 miles per week. Nada. Nothing in the old days.

"Then just accept that you're going to be slower," I said to him dispassionately. "Let it go."

We were driving to a race up in the city. A 5K. The car got quiet. We were lost in the past. We were going to run a version of the course where once, in May of 1979, we had both PR'd. But back then we had been young and strong. Now we were just lucky to still be running.

Old legs.

Hard to explain. You either have young legs or old legs. Depends less on age and more on how many pure miles you had on your legs. My friend and I had plenty. We weren't used up but we are towards the end of the line. Oh we can still run but getting faster was probably no longer an option. Not just running as fast as we had been in 1979 but running faster than we had last year.

Tough.

If I had retired at my peak, I would have given it up in 1986. That was my last year of running at a level close to where I had been running at for the previous 10 years. Bill Rodgers was right. You get about 8-10 years at your peak and then it gone.