A neighbor ran by this morning, halfway through a 10-mile training run. He retired earlier this year and decided to do another triathlon just after the new year. I used to be motivated like that, but never to do a run, swim, bike challenge. Instead, I’ve now settled into a daily running streak that reached 5,116 consecutive days this morning. It made me wonder when the last time was that I ran over 10-miles? I couldn’t find a date in my diary but noted five 6.2-mile races I did during this current running streak. There were two in Austin, Texas (Capital 10k) with my best time at 1:03:49 in March of 2012. That was when I was still able to run at slightly over a ten-minute mile pace. I also ran the Human Race in August 2008 at 1:08:25, Helvetica in June of 2015, and The Heartbreaker in February 2016. Those were the last of my distance races with the exception of the Hood to Coast relay event in August 2017. One of my training runs in preparation was 9-miles long and that seems to be the last time I covered that much ground in one morning. There were three legs of Hood to Coast that I finished in a 24-hour period of 7, 5.2, and 5.3 miles each.

Since that time, I’ve settled on a maximum distance of 3.1 miles and consistently cover this most every day. My pace has slowed to 14-16 minutes per mile on average, so covering 10-miles would take me over two-and-a-half-hours to finish, if I wanted to take an injury risk. In the good old days, I could have finished in well under an hour-and-a-half. My best Marathon (26.2 miles) time was just over 3-hours in 1979. It was an International Marathon that couldn’t happen in these Covid times, starting in Canada through the Windsor tunnel into the city of Detroit. Crossing any border is difficult these days. Also, border guards don’t like to see people running. 

It was during this time, that I once legged over 120-miles within the course of one week (over 17-miles a day)! My legs often feel like concrete anymore, but at 71-years of age I’m lucky to have avoided serious injury. It takes about a mile to even loosen up and then I begin to tire. There’s certainly a great deal of admiration for those who can still compete as fellow Sexagenarians. For me, however, it’s often just challenging enough to keep putting one foot in front of the other.