Once a runner, always a runner
Saturday, November 29th, 2008It takes awhile to know you’re always a runner. It takes tens of thousands of miles run. It takes time. It’s not as easy as you thought it would be, but then being a runner isn’t easy. You’re now over 50 years old, maybe 60, but you’re still out there putting in the miles. You’ve paid your dues.
When we hit our PRs, we didn’t quite know it would be our lifetime PR at the time they happened. There was always another race, another chance. We all seem to hit that crest silently, without really knowing it until much, much later,
If this is you, then surely you’ve had some of the following thoughts on the run:
You see where some local race is running its 35th annual. Has it been that long? It seems like yesterday when you ran in the first.
You’re running some trail in the middle of nowhere, and you greet a passing running like a long lost friend.
You have drawers, or boxes of race t-shirts, now much too small to wear, but much too important to dump.
You’ve put a little too much self identity into being a runner and it starts to catch up to you when you can’t run everyday, or can’t run at the ease and speed that you once did.
You hope that the sequel to Again to Carthage (the sequel to Once a Runner) will catch Cassidy in his 50s.
You get a private tour of the new Icahn Stadium, and you wish you could run a few effortless laps on the new track…or even better, race on it.
You fly over your state and see open spaces with miles and miles of trails just waiting to be run on. You drive along California’s interstate 5 and see miles of dirt roads circling farmlands and you know how fun it would be to run on them.
You peruse the race results, and notice how times you ran for 100th place, 20 or 30 years ago, now will get you in the top ten.
You look at the ‘over 50’ runners who have just taken up running as having that extra edge. Their legs aren’t beat up by tens of thousands of miles.
You read Runners by Roger Hart and say “hey, he’s writing about me.”
You go to high school cross country races and feel that strange dichotomy in knowing what the runners are feeling, and you wish you could be in there yourself, but know deep down inside, you could never come close to running their pace, although you ran it easily in other races and in other times.
