The Oldies

(When Runner’s World cut me loose as a columnist in 2004, I wasn’t ready to stop magazine work. This year I post the continuing columns from Marathon & Beyond. Much of that material now appears in the book Miles to Go.)

2010. “Age Unlimited” was the title of this program the day before the Royal Victoria Marathon. We three panelists talked about what hardly anyone in the audience wanted to think about, but everyone who hung around this sport long enough would become: older and slower.

My stagemates, Rose Marie Preston and Ken Bonner, would each run their 30^th Royal Vic the next morning. Rose Marie told of never being injured, and Ken said he seldom had. They agreed this was because they had run less and cross-trained more as they’d aged.

I spoke last and had the least to say about my recent marathons. They numbered just three in the decade about to end and just one – ever – in Victoria. I have been injured, lots of times in almost every way known to sports-medical science. I don’t cross-train, which might help explain the previous sentence.

So I yielded to Preston and Bonner to advise about training and racing at an age when injuries come faster and healing is slower. When my turn came to speak, I gave but one tip about making peace with age. That was to make friends with the watch. Or put another way, Don’t let the old times haunt you.

One of the best features of running is the personal record. No one can set it for you or can break it but you.

And for runners with more than a few years on us, one of the worst features for runners is also the personal record. It stands as clear and objective evidence of what we once could do and never will again. The permanent PRs will taunt you if you let them, which I don’t.

I’m proud of my old PRs, but no less proud of the personal worsts that fall (or rise) today. I once ran a faster marathon than almost anyone in the Victoria meeting room. Now I am slower than almost anyone there. If I let slower times shame me, they would have driven me from races long ago.

I’m no more ashamed of the PW than I am inordinately proud of the PR. The PW might mean even more to me.

My fastest time came at 23, an age when we can get by with almost anything and we take everything for granted. The slowest came in my latest marathon, after life had kicked me around for another four-plus decades. I take nothing for granted anymore, not even my next marathon.

We’re given about 10 years to improve our times, no matter when we started running. What then? I look to one of my early and lasting heroes for an answer.

Johnny Kelley won twice at the Boston Marathon and finished second many times. By the time I first interviewed Kelley, he was the sport’s elder statesman. His most memorable line spoken then: “What you keep doing after you’ve done your best racing is what really counts.”

For him it was continuing to run long after his PRs had passed. He kept going, and inspiring generations of younger runners, into his 90s. He judged success not by the stopwatch but by the calendar.

One way to keep time from haunting or taunting us is to ignore it. But that’s hard to do now when instant Internet results-reporting leaves no place to hide from inquiring minds, including our own.

Another way to play tricks with time is to renew the PR list every so often. National records account for age difference with listings by 10-year, five-year and even single-year increments. This should give us permission to do the same with personal records.

My way of making peace with time has been to run with it instead of against it. Except in races, which are rare these days and growing rarer, I rarely check the distance or pace. I just run by time periods – 30 minutes, one hour – and let the miles pass unnoticed.

I’ve long sung the praises of by-time running, giving every possible reason except the best one now, which is: Minutes and hours are the same length today that they were in 1964 when my mile took the least time, and in 1967 when I finished a marathon the soonest.

Later. I'm back to going by miles now, which are the same length now that they've always been. They take longer to finish, but those extra minutes don't haunt me when left off the books. Only the combination of distance and time reminds me too much of fast days long past.

(Photo: Johnny Kelley in one of his later-life races.)

[Many books of mine, old and recent, are now available in two different formats: in print and as ebooks from Amazon.com. The titles: Going Far, Home Runs, Joe’s Team, Learning to Walk, Long Run Solution, Long Slow Distance, Miles to Go, Pacesetters, Personal Records, Run Gently Run Long, Running With Class, Run Right Now, Run Right Now Training Log, See How We Run, Starting Lines, The Running Revolution and This Runner’s World, plus Rich Englehart’s book about me, Slow Joe.]