Old Runners

Recently I was at dinner with a friend (let's call him "Jim") that has been running longer than I've been alive. Jim was telling me that "back in the day" when he and his running partner were training for a marathon they would do these crazy long 30 mile training runs, crisscrossing the city. There goal was to maintain something like 7 minute miles for the entire run while chatting away like a couple of school girls on a sleep-over. When he saw the look of astonishment on my face he assured me that they were much younger than me at the time. They might have been a few years younger but not really that much. I think he was just being nice. Jim no longer races but he still gets out there almost every day. There have been days I've talked to him, complaining about the weather or some other minutia, and I find out he's been out for his daily run while I was crying about it being too cold.
I've learned a few things about old runners from Jim. Some are good, some not so good. For instance, Old Runners have this great stamina from years of accumulated miles. They can take a few months off (although they never do) and one day they'll just get up and start running again at the same distance and pace. The down-side is their knees and ankles are probably shot from the years of pounding the pavement in old shoes. You see, Old Runners seem to think that these new high tech shoes we wear are unnecessary. After all, they've been running for over 40 years in the same style of flat shoes they bought on sale when New Balance was in it's infancy. Don't get me wrong, Old Runners are willing to change. In fact Jim recently made the leap from carrying a full sized battery operated radio with those big headphones to the super techy ipod shuffle. Old Runners can have a major advantage over us "young" folks....many of them have pace-makers so they rarely have a heart rate over 150bpm. They can go out fast and stay there and never spike like we do. They might pass out for a minute or two but I figure with the time they gained they'll still come out ahead.
One last thing about Old Runners...because they're old school they have rarely worn sunglasses while doing all those crazy long runs at even crazier fast paces. The result of this is, of course, poor eyesight. So in honor of Old Runners (but mostly "Jim") that have found the glory of the internet I will change the background of this blog for at least one month so they will have an easier time reading it through the fog of their cataracts.