I’m not crazy about getting older. I’m in my 60s now, which, for someone who never thought he’d make it past 30, seems like quite an accomplishment. In fact, in the words of the late baseball great Mickey Mantle, if I’d known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself.
But getting older isn’t all bad. With each passing year, I find that I worry less about what other people think and more about how I feel. Don’t get me wrong—I love the idea of making people happy. Now, though, I recognize that I can’t please everyone all of the time, so I’m able to spend more time finding ways of sustaining my own happiness.
When I was younger I was sure that more was better. I wanted more money, more house, more job, more responsibilities, more everything. I judged myself against everyone else by whether or not I had more than they did.
As a runner I took the same approach. If 3 miles was good, 4 was better. If one marathon a year was good, six a year were better. I didn’t understand that I could find satisfaction in quality because I only understood quantity.
The idea that more is always better than less is an especially pernicious myth when it comes to a life of activity. It can become a disastrous belief as you age as a runner.
I’ve got a good friend in his late 50s who is what I define as a “nylon shorts” runner. He’s old school. He’s been running for most of his life, and he’s never met a hard workout that he didn’t like. The typical day for him is to pound out a 7-or-more-mile run. It doesn’t matter what he’s training for; he just goes out and runs hard.
When he was younger this approach worked pretty well for him. He could run hard all the time, then sign up for a race and expect a strong performance from himself. It didn’t matter if it was a local 5K or a major-league marathon. His philosophy was the same: Train hard. Race hard.
Recently he’s started to complain that he can’t keep up with the young guys anymore. I look at him sternly and ask why he thinks he should be able to keep up. His response is that he’s doing what he’s always done, so the results should be the same. He’s lost sight of the truth that your running self can’t be separated from the rest of yourself. We age. We grow. We change.
There was a time in the history of running when everyone worshiped at the altar of mileage. The only thing that mattered was that number in your log at the end of the week. The higher the number, the better the week.
Professional marathoners in those days were running weeks of over 150 miles. Think that through for a minute: over 150 miles a week. And they weren’t just doing it for one week; they were doing it for months at a time.
The theory was simple: The more you run, the better you get at running. That sounds good on the surface, but it turns out to be false. As an old education professor once told me about classroom instruction, “Kids learn what they do and damn little else.” Sure, you’ll learn how to run if you run a lot, but you’ll only learn how to keep running the way you’re running.
Many of us begin our running lives believing that old myth. I did. I believed that in order for me to be a runner, I had to run as much as possible, and the more I ran, the better runner I would be.
As I explained in Chapter 14, that wasn’t the case. More often than not, by running more I ended up having to run less—or in some cases ended up not being able to run at all.
We reach a point as runners where less really is more. My experience has been that it comes at major age thresholds and at watershed years in our running lives.
Since I didn’t start running until I was over the age of 40, I can’t speak from personal experience about what it’s like to run before you turn 40 and then to cross that threshold. I can tell you, though, what I’ve seen and heard from thousands of runners who have.
Somewhere around age 40 your body’s ability to restore and renew itself begins to slip. It isn’t dramatic at first. You may notice that you don’t have quite as much energy as you used to the day after a hard workout. You may notice that it just isn’t as much fun to do back-to-back long days.
When you’re under the age of 40, it takes about 24 hours for your body to recover from a hard workout. That translates into being able to run just about every day if you want to.
After age 40 it takes close to 48 hours for your body to fully recover. What that means is that by running too much, too hard, too far, too often, you may actually get worse instead of better.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t run every day, but it does mean that you have to consider what you’re trying to accomplish with every run. Each one can’t be a work of art, so some will have to be just runs.
After age 50 the cumulative effects of having been on the planet for half a century really begin to appear. Gravity can’t be denied, and parts of your body that were once well north of your center of gravity start to make their way down.
After 50 your joints, tendons, and all the connective tissue start to show signs of wear. It’s not that you’re ready for the rocking chair, but you do begin to notice that it’s a little harder to do what you’ve always done.
By 60 everything begins to change. It isn’t just your body; your mind, your soul, your spirit, and even your will begin to concede the truth of how many years have passed since you arrived on the planet. At 60 plus, I find that I am simultaneously more and less connected to everything around me.
I am more connected because I know how fleeting those connections can be. I am less connected for the same reason. Nothing lasts forever.
I’ve found that the best way to accommodate these changes is by accepting them as natural and necessary. Fighting them won’t work.
When I start to make a training schedule for myself now, I begin with the rest days. I know I will need to build in rest days and that if I don’t put them in up front, they will somehow get left out.
When I’m training now, I try to find the most efficient way to achieve my goals. I try to find the least risky ways of building mileage. I make sure there is always an alternative to doing one harder workout.
I’m also trying to find activities to complement my running that do not impose the same kind of pounding on my body. I walk more, not because I have to but because I want to. I haven’t conceded anything; I just feel that I’ve discovered a better way to stay active. I’ve returned to bicycling as both a recreational activity and a cross-training sport. I’ve even found that I can take a day completely off and not feel that it’s a waste of time.
What I’ve noticed is that the less I can run, the more I appreciate the times that I do run. If it’s true that absence makes the heart grow fonder, then not running has made me much fonder of running.
If you find yourself at a point in your running life where the fun just doesn’t seem to be there anymore, it may be time to consider whether you need to run less in order to enjoy it more. I can tell you for sure that if you have lost the joy in your running, it won’t be long before you will lose the will to run.
I started running because I knew that at some level something was missing in my life. I didn’t know what it was exactly, but I can tell you this: I took to running with the enthusiasm and eagerness of an animal released from a cage. The more I ran, the more I could run, and the more I wanted to run. There was no horizon that I couldn’t run to. Even though I ran slowly, I ran free. I ran uninhibited.
That sense of release from the bondage of my sedentary body was overwhelming. I couldn’t get enough of it. There weren’t enough hours in the day to run and to think about running. I would spend hours working out elaborate training schedules.
In the early years of my running career I was transported on the wave of constant improvement. It seemed as if every race brought a new best time, every training session brought a new sense of enlightenment about myself, and every time I laced up my shoes was an opportunity to discover a new secret about myself.
I’ve written before that through those early years, my running shoes felt like erasers, rubbing away the physical, emotional, and spiritual graffiti of my life. The changes on my inside were just as obvious as the changes on my outside.
But like any relationship, my relationship with running was bound to move past those heady early days when everything seemed perfect to the stark reality that not every run would be a mind-blowing experience. I progressed to a place in my relationship with running where I began to seek a balance between the runner I was and the runner I wanted to be.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve had to learn how to negotiate with my body. I’ve had to learn how to compromise with the parts that won’t automatically do what I want them to do.
In my early days of running, I would very often do that dance with the devil where I spent all my time on the edge of my ability. I tried to walk a tightrope between improvement and injury. Now, as a seasoned runner, I have come to appreciate the miracle that I am a runner at all. I am far less likely to risk not being able to run forever because I think I must run today.
I don’t need the constant reinforcement from running that I needed in those early years. Then, I was looking to running as the answer to everything that was wrong with me. I believed that by running I would eventually run away from all my problems. It wasn’t true. Running never solved any of my problems, but it did provide me with a forum in which I could consider how to solve them. Running provided a structure and a model upon which I could consider problems in my life. Running taught me that very often what I thought was one giant problem, like running a marathon, was actually a series of smaller problems that could be solved in sequence.
As my relationship with running deepened, I found that I had much more confidence in my ability to remain a runner. That may sound strange when you consider that over the years my pace has slowed and my mileage has dropped, but the truth is that I am more sure of myself as a runner now than I have ever been.
In the early days of my running, I believed that I wasn’t a real runner if someone else said I wasn’t. I didn’t run at the right pace or over the right distance. I would allow other people to steal my vision of myself as a runner when it didn’t match their vision.
What I finally understand is that the only person who can tell me whether or not I’m a runner is me. I finally recognize that running more doesn’t make me more of a runner; it just means I’m running more. Running faster doesn’t make me more of a runner; it just means I’m running faster.
After nearly 20 years of running, it has finally sunk in that in order to be a runner, all I really have to do is run. Just run! What a liberating thought.
Once I got it into my head that by running I was—by definition—a runner, everything about running got better. All the fears, the pressure, and the worries went away. What a wonder that here, in the winter running season of my life, the joy I felt the very first time I ran is back. It’s back because I know that every step is a step in the right direction, taking me closer to who I want to be—which is, after all, the gift that running has always given me.