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 blog content—is probably a bad idea. Instead, looking at an age milestone as an opportunity to rethink my fitness pursuits, and yeah, blogging 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 blog. Stay tuned.
