The old guy does running

Until I was 40 I thought there was nothing more pointless than going running for the sake of going running. OK, I played football, cricket and various other sports which required some running, but running for the sake of it seemed pointless. Then at 40, I was at a stage in life where I felt the need to set myself new challenges, so a couple of those challenges involved competing in a triathlon and running a half marathon (a full marathon always seemed a bit too much like hard work). Low and behold, very soon after 40 I’d achieved those objectives, and throughout my 40s I participated in a few triathlon events and a few half marathons. I was never very good at theses activities, but that was never the point, the point was being fit enough to be able to participate and to enjoy participating.

As I moved into my 50’s I ran less and yoga became more important to me. I never completely stopped running, but I didn’t do much and I didn’t run far. My excuse to myself was that being fairly big, 6′ 2″ and 13 and a half stone, I was never going to be a natural runner and running was just going to cause damage to my joints, knees in particular as I got older.

However, for a while now I’ve worked on the idea that my personal fitness strategy should involve yoga to keep me supple and relaxed, some weight work to retain muscle and body mass and should involve cycling and/or running to maintain cardio-vascular health. Clearly to do that I needed to stop trying to kid myself that running wasn’t going to be good for me in the long term. This period of lock-down has provided the ideal opportunity to put the strategy into practice – more time to do things. So the running has picked up and for the last couple of months, there have been a few more runs, getting longer and slightly faster. As previously I’m not particularly concerned about how far I run or how fast I run, much more about how the running feels and how it makes me feel. The great thing is that the running is feeling better and easier, leaving me feeling better and fitter. I pretty much always have the runner’s endorphin high at the end of a run and the sense of achievement from a run is remarkably positive. I’m slow and always will be, but the rhythm of my running is improving and the more I do, the better it feels.

So the challenge now that I’m in my 70’s is to keep this going in a manageable way. I don’t want to overdo the running at the expense of other activities, but having got to the point where the running feels good and is making me feel good, I need to ensure I stay in this place. I know from experience how easy it is to stop doing something like running (for all sorts of reasons that I can readily justify to myself) and then after a couple of months how difficult it is to start up again – and the older I get the more difficult the restarting becomes. My mantra about pretty much all of the positive activities that I’m involved in now is “keep on going” because I know that the older I get the more difficult it is to start things up again once I stop.

As I look at friends of my age, there is such a clear difference between the ones who have kept on going with activities that keep them fit, flexible and relaxed and the ones who, for whatever reason have stopped. It just reinforces my determination to keep on going