Fast is a relative term

I’ve been thinking recently about 'later life running', as Richard Askwith so delicately describes it in his excellent book The Race Against Time

Sunday run on Dartmoor. Photograph: Ben Wrigley/Unsplash

I clocked up 50 miles (80km) last week without even thinking too much about it. Often I have a mileage goal in mind - usually around 35 to 40 miles - and it can be quite hard to reach it, and I start to think, how do people regularly run 50+ miles a week? And then this week, it just happened. The key was two longish runs - I did 12 miles on Friday and 14 miles on Sunday. Both runs were done with friends, which helped - if it had just been me, I would have probably talked myself down from such distances.

I’ve been thinking about “later life running” as Richard Askwith so delicately describes it in his excellent book The Race Against Time. I’m half planning to sign up to a road half marathon soon, and my first thought was whether I could shoot for a personal best time. But then I realised that my PB is 77 minutes, which is averaging under 6 minutes per mile, for an entire half marathon. That seems a bit of a stretch to me right now, to say the least.

So then I started thinking, what would be a good time for me as a 50-year-old? On one level, that feels like slightly defeatist thinking, a sort of consolation prize, an acceptance that I’m getting old. But age is just a number, right? You’re only as old as you feel, right?

Hmmm.

I realised that when I was a junior, and running seriously, I had no qualms about focussing primarily on my age group. None of the juniors I knew felt defeatist about trying to be the best junior in their club/town/county. We raced in the junior races, and that was all that mattered. What the seniors were doing didn’t even enter our thoughts.