Resilient Thoughts About Aging

You can’t run like you used to.

So you reluctantly seek out flatter races with generous cutoffs…and complain.

“Getting old sucks,” you tell people, and they agree right back because it’s the truth.

Every day, a hill is harder than it used to be, a muscle tweaks in a weird way, you’re stiffer in the morning and it’s just going to get worse.

Except “getting old sucks” isn’t the truth. It’s the way you’re choosing to think..  

Look, if you’re on this planet long enough to age, you have two choices.

You can either see aging as something bad that happens to you, or something to embrace.

I recommend the latter.

First of all, getting old is an honor. Not everyone gets to do it.

Two years ago, I walked out of the emergency room after a car wreck that should have killed me. Every day now is a bonus day. 

Even without a wreck, you can look at each day this way. Every day is a bonus day for you too. Are you going to complain about the gift?

And consider this - running “like you used to” is a fantasy that never existed. 

Years ago, you had bad runs and good ones, fast runs and slow, PRs and DNFs. Every day, week, month and year was different. 

You had a mixed bag of runs like you do today. There was no constant state of running you can compare to. Your brain likes to generalize the past into a consistent level when in reality, no run or race was the same.

How you “used to run” is a made up fiction - a concept that never existed.

You never ran like you used to.

Is it helpful to compare yourself to a fantasy of the past? No, so let it go.

Another point - it takes skill, discipline and mental strength to run your best at whatever age you happen to be.

The real question is, “Are you running your best for where you are right now?”

Speed is only one arbitrary way among thousands to measure how well you’re running. An equally valid way is how fast you run with all the lifetime miles you have on your body. Or how fast you run when your joints creak this much on a scale of 1-10. Or how much you enjoy each run.

Give yourself credit and think beyond the limited measures of finish time and place.

And one last point for those of us 60 and above - we’re blazing a trail into uncharted territory. 

There are some of us, but not nearly enough to say how ultrarunning goes in these decades. Even then, runners are always breaking boundaries to reshape what’s possible.

This is especially true for women because there’s shamefully little known about menopause and perimenopause in general and almost nothing about how menopause affects a female ultrarunner’s body and performance.

We’re writing the story for ourselves…and for the runners who follow us. 

Anyone can write a depressing story. They need examples of what’s possible.

No one has defined the limits. We get to imagine whatever we want to do and make it happen, with no one to tell us we can’t.

That’s the privilege of a lifetime.

So quit looking back. Let the past rest. 

You have today and you have a lot of future ahead. It’s time to get on it and start living it.