Crap I’m Getting Old

I’ve come to the realization.  I’m getting old.  Fast.

Part of it was me turning 23, but the main reason is because of this triathlon stuff.

I started tracking my training like I talked about last week. I set up a little chart to track my progress.I do pretty well on short runs, but I literally ran the farthest I ever ran in my life on Tuesday and it wasn’t pretty.  For those of you too lazy to make a click with your mouse, I included a screenshot.  Pay attention to that number with the red circle around it.

10:26 mile pace. Really? I’m a ten-minute miler now?  I’m going to admit, that’s kind of depressing.  That means I’m getting passed by the mom’s pushing their kids in the stroller. [No offense to any mother’s out there who run while pushing their kids with a stroller.  I’m just impressed by the fact that you can run faster while pushing a small child without complaint whereas I’m running without pushing anything & my biggest struggle is to remind myself that openly crying is not considered good running trail etiquette.]

Now to be fair, I didn’t really run all 5.32 miles.  I actually had to stop & walk a small portion of it [and by a small portion, I’m talking at the very least a mile so that added a good chunk of time on to my pace. Actually I did really good for the first 3 miles or say.  Mostly because that’s the distance I’m used to, but as soon as I got about 3.5 miles. I started to break down.  My sides cramped up & suddenly my knee started hurting.  You could say it was a shock to my system. I broke down and just walked for a bit and started to think.

You know how back in high school, you would compare yourself to the upperclassmen in different activities?  Whether it was school or sports, if they beat you in some sort of activity, you could always attribute it to the fact that they were 2 years older than you.  I’m on the other side of the spectrum now.  As people started passing me, and I found myself reasoning that the reason they’re passing me is because they’re younger than me.  They’ve got energy, youth and don’t have to worry about their old bodies breaking down on them.  Ah, what it’s like to be young…Then I snap back to reality and realized

I’m only 23 dangit!

The people passing me aren’t younger than me. In fact some of them are a lot older!  They’ve just trained more & complain less.  I’ve got a lot left in me.  I’ve still got energy, youth and whether or not my knee wants to cooperate, it’s going to have to put up with it.  I’m not over the hill QUITE yet.

My boss asked to go running with him today.  He wants to go pretty far too [8 miles or so].  I’m not sure I want to do it, but I’m heading out anyways.  Life’s too short to keep telling myself I “can’t” do certain things when I really mean “I’m not sure I want to try cause I’m afraid it will be too hard.” I’m probably going to die, but I’m going to do it.

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What about you?