No Race For Old Men

I have been increasingly an advocate for shorter distance racing and training.  High intensity is better as we get older I keep reading.  All the rock star over-50 runners at Seattle’s Club Northwest focus on 5k and cross country and they have been absolutely thriving - blasting through 5k under 18, even 17 minutes as they pass the 50-year, even 60-year mark.   And the guys I remember from the Seattle running scene from years ago who did lots of marathons? I don’t see their names on any race finisher lists any more, or even hear about them running at all - I imagine them shuffling around a nursing home unable to bend down and tie their own shoes after all the damage to their legs from the marathon training.  I have come to see intense training as the fountain of youth. 

So Sunday's Shibuya Ekiden (Relay) should be perfect for my program to maintain this vitality — a lung-searing 2.9 kilometer sprint around a tight park course.  

In past years (see these posts from 2014 and 2015), I achieved great  glory in the over-40 age group relay team.

But this year I find myself the anchor runner on my team's open division A team - I am a last-second substitute on this team of young, fast runners.  When the 3rd runner hands me the sash our team is hanging onto 3rd place and poised for another glorious place on the podium.  I tell myself to give it everything and hold off the other runners - I essentially need to just run the kind-of two mile time I could easily do when I first started running years ago, the kind of speed an average high school kid can do.   I manage to hold onto 3rd for the first kilometer, but then a lithe college aged runner glides me like I am not moving.  Around the hallway point another college kid passes me, and then another. And then yet another.  I see my teammates along the race course exhorting me to somehow speed up and hold off the college aged competition as I lumber along, but I simply don't have the speed to summon. Finally I stagger across the finish line in 7th place.  
  

Here is a picture of me at the finish line looking shell-shocked. I am remembering why athletes turn to longer races as they get older, and I ponder if I should have acted my age and joined my aged teammates doing a half-marathon that same morning in Chiba.