Flashes of Panic

When I woke up in the night and realized the take-out Chinese I’d picked up on my way home from the pool was coming back for a rematch, I figured today’s 5K was out of the question.

But an hour and a half before race time, I felt shaky but not ill. I figured I could get around the course. And a half-dozen other grad students from my department were running, so I figured at the very least I would go down and say hi.

I wound up running the whole way with Professor Σ’s PhD student. He’s coming back from an injury, and today what we each felt capable of matched pretty well. We took nearly nine minutes for the first mile, in heavy traffic, then were sub-8 pace for the rest of the way. I didn’t lose my breakfast (two slices of toast), and he was pretty happy with his time. I think we both felt a bit better about the race than we would have otherwise.

When I was younger than I am now, and saw my running career as years of ever-faster times stretched out in front of me, I would sometimes wonder what it would be like when I reached an age where I was getting progressively slower every year—where I would regularly find myself saying things like, “I just don’t recover as fast as I used to,” and where being the youngest in the age group was an advantage, not a disadvantage. How will I stay motivated to keep coming out, to keep putting the miles in?

I may or may not be pretty close to that age, but I am getting a good idea of the answer to my question. It stops being about the times; it’s more about the people and the events, like it has been all along.

Now Playing: Falls To Climb from Up by R.E.M.

Technorati Tags: race, running, somerville