It occurred to me the other day—as in someone pointed out that its coming up like an approaching steam train—that with my impending birthday in November I’ll be entering into a new age category.
This is pretty basic stuff, but age categories are usually race divisions for competitive racers. You enter a race, provide your birthdate, and they slot you into a group of people of the same general age and gender.
Right now, for example, I am in the “40-49 M” group (or sometimes 45-49 M group).
I’m not super competitive, so the only real bearing this has on my life is that—upon finishing any race, or maybe even a Park Run—I get to look at my results overall, but also get to look at how I stack up with all the other forty-ish men.
But I’ll admit, being at the late-end of that age group has a psychological cushion to soften the blow: for me, at least, there has been a pretty big difference between forty and forty-nine, fitness and health-wise. So, simply, getting outrun as a forty-nine year old by a forty year old is kind of one of those shrug it off moments. It’s a hard pill, sure, but obviously a forty year old guy has an advantage over me at forty nine, right?
In a little more than a month I’ll get those results and it will be for the “50-59 M” group.
And the same rule applies, but with a catch. I’ll be the relatively young a spry guy, sure, but here’s the problem: most of the fifty-something guys I know who are still running are the real hard core bastards. They are at the lifers, the ones at the tail end of a long career where their thirties and forties were actually competitive races. They didn’t find themselves taking up the sport and muddling through for a couple decades: they raced and meant it, and at fifty-nine they are lithe and fast and don’t settle for a jog.
That’s my new age category soon. And I’ve got mixed feelings about how the gut punch of racing against my new peer group is gonna feel.
Definitions
- october
- Fully into autumn, October is a month of shifting seasons, short days, long shadows, and gorgeous sunsets. The cobwebs are hung on the eaves in preparation for halloween, and here in Canada we're running off Thanksgiving dinner for a couple weeks after a proper good meal mid-month.
- park run
- Just go online and find one. Every Saturday all over the world people meet up with their barcodes in hand to run a free semi-competitive five klick run, each local event locked to a route and run by volunteers. It's huge in the UK, but we've got a growing list in Canada and I logged one in Japan in 2025. I am slowly working my way to a milestone.
- race
- You train and train and train some more, and then for no clear reason you pay a bunch of money to run as fast as you possibly can at a very specific time with a bunch of strangers along a course lined with more strangers (or along paths lined with trees if you are an ultra runner) at the end of which you are handed a medal and a banana and a sense of achievement unlike anything you will feel again (until you sign up for your next one.)
- september
- The days are noticeably shorter when we realize that September is upon us. The post-summer routine kicks in and people are back to regular work schedules and kids are back in school. It can still be warm, but the hottest days are behind us and most of the biggest races of the year are in the rear view. We savour September knowing winter is too soon to come.
