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At some point, you’ll realize you can’t run a sub-20 minute 5K anymore. Stop Comparing Yourself to Your Younger Self It simply takes longer to crank up the old engine than it used to. I like to think I’ve traded in my old sports car for a large diesel truck. A fitness level that may have taken 8 weeks to achieve in our 30’s may now take 16-20 weeks to achieve.
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In my experience the older athlete needs more time to build to a peak than a younger one. Though we are getting older, many of us still have long term goals, whether they are big summer 100-mile races, an elusive loop we’ve always wanted to complete, or simply coming to the starting line of the local 50K as fit as possible. Having quality hard efforts also builds confidence, so even though I have fewer of them these days I find I get more bang for my buck out of them. Simply put, it seems the extra easy day between hard efforts allows the hard efforts to actually be hard rather than just another attempt at a slog when I really should be going easy. However, with age I have gravitated toward a hard/easy/easy cycle. And for much of my running life, I did the same. Many younger runners have, over the years, practiced the hard/easy training pattern on a weekly and monthly basis. As such, it’s important to not stress about the laborious nature of those first few miles, but rather to embrace them as part of the process and allow them to be a gateway into something better during the second part of the run.
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Now, I spend the first creaky 10 minutes or so of every run making sure everything still works, getting blood streaming out to the extremities, and cranking up the heart rate to a somewhat sustainable level. Here they are: Start Runs SlowlyĪt my age, gone are the days when I could just roll out of bed every morning, jump into my running clothes, and bust out out sub-7 minute miles right off my doorstep. And, in the process, I came up with five key tips to keep running happily into old age. It is certainly one of the most pleasurable parts of my daily existence and so, as both a runner and a running coach, I began to reflect on what things are most important to the aging runner. And, of course, running was close to the top of my list. So, after being depressed about this realization for a little bit, I began noodling around with thoughts of what in my life gives me pleasure and how I can takes those things and find ways to maintain or enhance them in this stage of life. Put bluntly, it felt to me that after 50 I was on the downhill side of life. While I know “age is just a number” there was something about the Big 5-0 that felt a bit different. When I turned 50 I felt like an old man, just like that.