The Struggle Bus

The one thing I've learned with each passing year, is the older you get the greater the price you pay for downtime. It used to be I could miss a few weeks of training and be right back where I was within a fairly short period of time. That's definitely no longer the case. Couple in the fact that my life is a lot busier in general than it used to be, and comebacks just plain SUCK! Over the past couple weeks my heel has been getting gradually better. It's still not 100%, but it seems to be headed in that direction. That's the good news. The bad news is I'm currently in the worst shape I've been in since I started running 20+ years ago and I'm just flat struggling to get going with my training. The motivation is there for the most part, but it's not always strong enough to overcome the excuses.

Running has never necessarily been fun for me. As I've documented in this blog before, I competed in just about every sport EXCEPT running in high school then sort of fell into running in college when I realized I had the potential to be halfway decent at it. Now don't get me wrong, it's not that I don't enjoy it at all. However, the reason I run as much as I do is for the competitive aspect not because I enjoy it that much. In other words, if it weren't for the desire to be fast, I'd probably run 3-4 miles at a time 3-4 days a week and that would be that. I guess what I'm getting at is training at the level I try to train at is never necessarily all that much fun, and when I'm already tired from work, the weather might be bad, and I have a nagging pain like this heel problem has been, some days it's very hard to convince myself to get out the door.

That said, the past couple weeks I've totaled 19 miles in 4 runs both weeks. The first week, that was more or less by design, but last week I definitely intended to do more and just didn't get it done. In fact, 16 of the 19 miles occurred in the first 3 days of the week. A trip to Charlotte over the weekend factored into things, but still, the old Steve, or maybe I should say the young Steve, would have found a way to squeeze in some runs, but the current Steve didn't really even try. That's definitely got to change if I want to make a go of getting fit again. As for the runs I've been doing, they're slow (7:30-7:40/mile), six miles is the longest I've gone so far, and I haven't done anything other than just jog around. I need to get more confident that my heel is going to hold up before I try to run much farther or incorporate any strides or harder efforts.

So, that's the update as of today. As a side note, I've topped 16 miles in the first 3 days of this week, so I'm on pace to hit somewhere in the 30's if I can hold it together. If so, that'll be a nice step in the right direction. Finally, I'll conclude with some motivation to myself and all us "old" folks out there. I happened to notice that this past weekend a guy I used to race against from time-to-time ran the Quintiles Marathon in Wilmington, NC, in 2:34, a fast time for anyone. However, this guy is now 50 years old. Yep, that's right, 50! He and I had some good battles on the occasions we raced "back in the day," several of which I came out on top of, and his 5k/10k PRs are actually a little slower than mine. Based on that incredible performance, I decided to check out some of his other results over the past few years and he's really held together extremely well. He may not be as fast as he once was, but he's really not all that far from it. It's pretty amazing and at least gives me some hope that maybe there's still time for me to get back in shape and at least run a few decent times. You gotta walk before you can run though, so I've got a lot of work ahead of me!