Gettin' Older - Part I

Like many people, somewhere around my late 20’s, I lost the excitement of my youth when it came to my birthday. What was a day of celebration became a day I’d rather forget, simply because it was a reminder that I was getting older. Aging isn’t something that excites many people, but for athletes it takes on additional significance as you know that along with it comes an inevitable decline in performance. With each year that goes by, you know the clock is ticking on the time you have left to be at your best in your sport. As Charles Barkley is credited with saying, “Father Time has never lost to anyone.”

I got a late start in distance running, not really getting into the sport until my sophomore year of college. I always thought that would likely mean I would peak later than most, so I didn’t worry as much about getting older as far as competing went because I figured I could extend my best years into my early thirties if not beyond. However, after several years of improvement post-college, I decided to take an “all in” approach to see what I could do. I had become friends and training partners with guys who had qualified for the Olympic Trials or at least had those aspirations and that capability, and I wanted to see how good I could be. Accordingly, I trained like a madman, often running week after week of triple digit mileage.

This approach worked to a certain extent, as it led to some PRs that were far beyond what I could have ever imagined myself running back when I was in college, but it came with a price. Eventually I got hurt, which over time turned into a downward spiral of injuries that I just never could fully overcome. I would recover from one problem only to have another, and several of those lingered on while others developed. What I thought would be my best years of running in my early thirties turned out to be a huge struggle.

Furthermore, after a while, consistency became an issue. At first, I had enough base behind me that I could come back from an injury quickly and return to competing at a fairly high level after just a few weeks of training. However, when things got to the point where I could only string together a few weeks of running before another issue would knock me out, it eventually caught up to me. It started to take longer and longer to get back into shape, which only frustrated me more and made me train even harder and that obviously led to additional problems. Like I said, it was the definition of a downward spiral.

Additionally, age started to become a factor. Like I mentioned earlier, as you get older, it’s inevitable that your athletic ability starts to decline. For distance runners, this decline usually manifests itself most prominently with a loss of basic speed. In other words, you might be able to hammer out the miles as good as ever, but when it comes down to running truly fast, you start to lose a step or two. Now, this decline in speed can definitely be kept to a minimum with the proper sort of training, but with how things went for me in my thirties, I never could do (or at least never did) that sort of work. I had a philosophy, which wasn’t totally incorrect, that I needed to be able to do tempo runs before I could do true speed workouts or especially things like sprints and drills, and thanks to the injury cycle I was stuck in, I never could get past point A to get to point B. Admittedly I was making some of the same mistakes over and over, but regardless, things were headed in the wrong direction. This all culminated in 2010 when I suffered a Jones Fracture in my right foot not once but twice. As a result, I lost basically an entire year of running and was told I might never be able to run again. Those were dark times for me to be quite honest.

Since this post is starting to get long, I’m going to wrap it up and finish with a subsequent post in a day or so. Suffice it to say that my thirties were very frustrating and I failed to meet any of my running goals. There were times when I got downright bitter over it, but what’s done is done. All I can do now is learn from my mistakes and do the best I can going forward. Will I be able to make up for lost time? No, I don’t think so. However, I can sit around and think about what might have been or I can see what might still can be. There have been points in time where I’ve very seriously considered hanging up my running shoes, at least in terms of competing, but when it comes right down to it, I’m just not ready to do that yet. I’m still driven and I believe I have some good racing left in me. My next post will be about my goals for the next few years.