Running for Your Life: Playing the Race Card

So, what’s next? It’s been more than six months since my last race and I’m starting to feel a little antsy. It’s funny that before I ran the Brooklyn Half Marathon in 2009, I hadn’t given road racing very much thought. In fact, I was just content to lope along, to get out running every other day as I’ve done since the mid-1970s, a few months after I very nearly died from a malicious circulatory breakdown that I firmly believe has been held in check largely because of my running exercise routine, which my wife, M, monitors, not that she needs to because I’m a slave to it but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate her attention.

Hard to pinpoint what changed, but I put some it down to hubris. In the early years of my running, when I was in my twenties and early thirties, my pace was so hampered by a leg that even today swells because of my circulatory issues that I didn’t even dream of competing well in my age group. It was a matter of pride, I guess, because before I got sick I'd considered myself an athlete of sorts, so I didn’t much like the idea of racing with a bum leg that pretty much guaranteed that I'd finish in the last third of even the most recreationally oriented race.

Now, though, in my late fifties, those thirty-plus years of running – and now months of cross-training since my hamstring injury of March 2011 – have helped to boost me into a different race status. Even in the Boston Marathon 2012, I finished well within the top third of my age group (307th of 1,080 finishers, or 28 percent), which has pricked that hubristic layer that I mentioned above.

What’s happened is this: Closer to sixty years old than thirty, I’m trying to measure what is the best I can be. It’s a twist, but I’ve convinced myself that at age 57, or 58, or even 60, I’ll have finished a half-marathon or a marathon with a new PR (Personal Record). At what point I’ll have to accept that I’m getting slower not faster I can’t begin to know.

Which brings me to the race card. I’m shooting for the Brooklyn Half in May 2013 and then the Catalina, Calif., vertical half in late September (with daughter Kate!), then a year later I’ve every intention of running the Steamtown 2014. If I manage to qualify for Boston, then look for me at the Boston Marathon 2016. I’ll be in a new age category, 60-64. That’s my goal, God willing. Oh yeah, and a promise to keep this blog up and running too. For at least three and a half more years!

Next: Running for Your Life: Think Fly Not Flu