Running with Age

As I get older I find I have to repurpose my running. When I was younger I used it primarily to compete. It was the one thing I really felt competitive at and I almost didn’t know what to do with it because I was good at it. I also relished the fact that people thought I was crazy to just go out and run six miles. I would enter road races to improve my times and maybe come away with hardware. I would also go out and run to clear my head.

            Now my running is anything but competitive. I find that I actually have to roust myself to run most of the time. Now I run to escape the effects of aging and to compete against the downfall of my own body. I run to avoid excessive weight gain. And yes, I still run to clear my head, to run away from those negative thoughts of time slipping away.

            But sometimes I still just want to be that crazy guy who runs endlessly, and plenty of people think I am crazy but there are plenty more who run now compared to those old days when I stood out as a crazy. I still want to compete, though now I don’t consider people under 50 fair competition. I consider it competitive to maintain times and occasionally beat some older times. My competitive nature is not gone and sometimes that frustrates me because I am slower. And that is the part of my running that I am working on repurposing. That is the part of my running that sometimes makes it so I don’t want to go out running as much as I used to, the part that now notices more than ignores aches and pains. But even so, I still run and with each step I remind myself that I run to live as I always have. And living isn’t really a competition, is it?