There are two things I never really expected about getting older that have taken me by surprised.
The first thing is that my running has really slowed down. I know, I’ve heard everyone say that when you get older, you just get slower. Look at the top scores of any race, and you’ll see that the 20-something group will usually beat the 50-something group. So, in that respect, sure, I was going to slow down. But what I didn’t expect was how hard I was going to have to work at it to even maintain my running.
Back when I ran my first marathon, or even my tenth, I trained by running. I loved to go to the gym or do yoga if I had time. But, as the training would intensively, I would cancel all other activity besides running, eating, sleeping, and going to work. I just didn’t have the time to waste on the luxury of the gym or yoga.
Then life changed.
Having KZ later in life really took a bigger toll on my body than I thought. It wasn’t so much the physical process of having a child, though my hips and waist did expand and will never return, but the challenges that followed. I wasn’t expecting the massive lack of sleep for years on end. I wasn’t expecting the lack of support from family and friends. It wasn’t as if anyone was mean, it was just that we were living in London and the majority of our friends and all of our family were in the States. I needed a lot of support but was on my own to handle this brave new world. Hence, I had far less time to workout and was exhausted when I got around to doing it. The stress didn’t help my diet either.
The pre-KZ would not have even spoken to the med of today. We are two totally different people.
I ran the Disney Marathon, my 31st marathon, on January 12. I was training hard, but did back off on the yoga and the gym work even though my coach had it on my training plan. The yoga I stopped in September when KZ started Kindergarten. I didn’t have the time to do it in the morning before school, so I just dropped it. Then I became busy with the running, my homework, and general mom duties that I backed off on the gym. About a month before Disney, I tore my Achilles while racing on the ice in Central Park. I couldn’t run for the entire month before the race. I spent the time on the elliptical or the pool, thinking I was doing everything I could especially during the holiday season. In my pre-KZ life, this would have been plenty. I expected to get to the starting line refreshed and “springy” ready to run the sub-four marathon for which I had trained.
Not so.
I managed to drag my butt across the finish in 4:24:16, a 10:04 pace.
My doctor and coaches all agreed. I needed to really focus on my yoga, stretching, and strength work. I needed to have a strong core, and be flexible. In the future, they think I’ll need to spend as much time cross training as I would running if I plan to continue to run marathons. They are estimating two and a half hours a day.
I am signed up for one more marathon, Big Sur at the end of April. Jeremy really wanted to do it and signed us both up. It is very difficult to get into and even harder to complete. I’ve been told that I can add twenty minutes to my time just because the course is so challenging.
The truth is, I don’t have to document to the world that I am getting older and slower. I don’t need to run anther marathon. I like training for the half distance. It doesn’t take my life to train for it, and the chance of injury isn’t as great. I enjoy yoga and the gym, but I also have other priorities now. I want to be healthy, but I want to have a life, not just a running life. An hour or so in the gym sounds much more doable than two and a half.
The second thing I never really expected about getting older was that it would happen to me.
