I have been thinking a great deal about aging and running. I could think about it in relation to other sports too but running is my poison so that's where my brain resides for better or worse.
I went over to the club workout at West Valley College. Once there, I ran into Tom and Jim, both who are shadows of their former selves. Jim is a larger version (his words) of what he sued to be, fighting weight and bad knees. Tom is still slim but his knees are bothering him too. Danny ran by doing a 3 mile workout. He looked slow, heavy and in pain from the effort.
Jake showed up at breakfast at Carrows totally wiped out from his daily short hard runs (versus his weekly long progression hard runs). Dimitri repeated his take of the Former Soviet Union and all there attempts to understand and conquer the recovery quotient. In the end, they found that rest the most effective anecdote to hard running. All the other stuff, supplements, ice baths, massage and even some very illegal stuff, didn't hold up over time.
On a personal level I am seeing many different versions of the decay of aging. Hell, I am going through it.
I told Jim that I run every other day (mostly) but very slowly most of the time. And if I am good little boy and stick to this simple recipe I may get to run hard once every 2nd or 3rd week over some distance south of 5K.
Big Bad Billy (my nickname for my chiropractor) told me that recovery is in the head. By this he meant that if you believed in your program and the recovery techniques you were using (really, really believed) you would in fact recover. But you can fool yourself. It is a bit like the movie Somewhere in Time. The hero wills himself back to 1912 to meet the love of his life. He literally hypnotizes his way through time. He is forewarned that he needs to divest himself of anything that represents the era he is traveling from. It works and he meets the woman he loves. But in the end he finds a simple penny in his pocket from his own time period and is launched back to the present.
Training has always been that way for me. If I believe and trust what I am doing I will get faster. As a veteran runner it might only be faster than what I was doing last year but I do progress. But if I find that penny (in this case start to veer from what I believe) I will be launched back to the slower present.
I was running very well in March and April but began to train too quickly on my easy days. I had put the HRM away and was untethered. On almost every run I was coming through certain milestones faster than I had in 2-3 years. Then, I time trialed one of my courses, running close to what I had done at age 62! At age 65 you don't get faster than you were at 62 (given that you were always running and testing yourself). The Wayback machine was humming. I was beginning to think that perhaps I could wayback it to age 60 or even 59.
Then I found the 2010 penny. A cold, followed by an ear infection and then God knows what (allergies, another cold???) and I was back at "go".
So I am rebuilding. I have decided that I will put back on the HRM. And when I begin to feel really good, I will not get full of myself because I am running faster in training. The HRM will decide the pace. The only time I will take myself off the leash is when I am time trialing a course. I will use AT runs to chart my progress. 100 meter strides will be my only speed work.
All well and good if I stick to it but my plan is to remember that the machine works if I give it a chance. I just have to remember that the "Time Monster" rides the Wayback machine too.
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