I’ve been watching my fiftieth birthday creep ever closer. Five-oh.
In November I’ll enter a new age category, an age about that if you had asked me at thirty if I would be a distance runner I would have laughed in your face. By fifty, at thirty, I was pretty sure I would have inherited the family physique and been a connoisseur of stretchy pants and diabetes medications.
My running thirties were a time of building fitness. I went from couch to five, then ten, then marathons. I celebrated forty by running the New York Marathon with just weeks left in that lead-in decade of my life.
My forties, interrupted as they were by a pandemic and various running injuries, have been a time of enjoying and maintaining that fitness as I can. I haven’t been pushing myself towards longer races nor have I done much besides survive in this sport.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about my third decade in this sport.
And yet, finding motivation in public performance—in other words, running for content—is probably a bad idea. Instead, looking at an age milestone as an opportunity to rethink my fitness pursuits, and yeah, writing reflectively about it for the next couple years is less troublesome. In fact, it might be pretty natural for a guy who’s been using public writing as an outlet for the last quarter century.
This, of course, all links into weight and health and diet and training with a renewed focus on where I hope to be when I’m sixty… and hopefully, the universe willing, still running.
What that looks like is something I still have a couple months to ponder, but I am pondering it, and it may be one of the main thrusts of this writing project. Stay tuned.
Definitions
- august
- In the month of August where I live summer peaks and the days are often relatively hot (in the high 20s or low 30s) muggy, smokey and dry. Rain is infrequent, but when it arrives it comes in the form of drenching downpours and epic thunderstorms. We begin our runs earlier in the day because the local marathon runs late in the month and our training distances are maxing.
- five-oh
- I started running when I was barely thirty-ish. I was a bit overweight and out of shape, but young. Twenty years later I started writing this blog on the edge of turning 50. Five. Oh. And running at that age, even when you've been doing it for twenty years, is a whole new game.
- motivation
- Like many things in life, running is an act of motivation. You make yourself put on the gear. You put in the effort to lace up. You open the front door and you step out into the world and the weather. You press the start button on your watch and you go. Step after step, one footfall at a time.
- 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.
- pandemic
- It seems silly to define a worldwide event that affected literally everyone on the planet, but years have passed since those months in 2020 and beyond when COVID-19 shut down society and forced us to change our habits and routines.
- 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.
