I was young once. Back when I was young, I could run without injuring myself. And I could run faster. But that was then, and this is now. Now, I can barely get out of bed without doing something to my body. I was JRA last week, not even going very fast, and started to feel some discomfort in my right calf. It was nothing of any consequence, and I continued with my run. By the time I finished my run, it was a bit tight. I decided that discretion was the better part of valor and took a few days off from running. I swam and lifted over the weekend, and my leg felt reasonably good, and my calf had loosened up.
I went for a run two days ago, again just out for a easy trot after work. My right calf again started to tighten up. By the time I finished, it was quite tight and sore. I've decided to take a little time off of running, probably a week or so, to see if it will calm down.
It's pretty annoying, really. Do a hard workout? It's going to take a couple more days to recover than before. Turn and try to reach out to grab something? I might pull a muscle (or two). Turn too quickly? I might lose my balance and fall over. And why are my arms shorter than before? I can't see things in the distance, and I can't see things close up.
When I turned 30, I noticed that, almost to the day, it was taking me a day longer to recover from a hard workout or race. When I turned 40, I noticed that it didn't take me any longer to recover from a race, but I was certainly slower. And when I turned 50, I just became slow, no longer able to even move very fast at all. When you read about training philosophy, invariably the one concept that comes out is that you want to avoid the ''gray zone,'' the zone that is too hard to be easy and too easy to be hard. Well, I can tell you personally that the gray zone is pretty much where I find myself most days. I'm working, but not hard enough (and certainly not fast enough), and it's definitely not easy.
I posed a question to my best friend recently. He has been a runner for as long as I have, and we used to run together regularly. Now, we both have slowed down. My question was, "If we have been running for so long (30+ years), why is it not getting any easier? You would think that, after 30+ years, we would have gotten the hang of this whole running thing." Of course, he had no real answer for this, and just laughed at the futility of the pursuit.
A month or so ago, I was swimming a set of 100 IM's. Somewhere in the midst of it, I realized that my 17 year-old son can swim a 200 nearly as fast as I can swim a 100. When I told him that, his comment was, "Are you really that slow? I think I can dog paddle that fast." Ah, youth.
