Signing up for things, heaven help me
or, why I keep trying longer and longer races as I get older
Lately, I’ve been signing up for things with the phrase heaven help me. As in, sure, I’ll join the rowing coach for race pieces in the Charles River basin on a Saturday when I haven’t trained for sprints, heaven help me. Or, sure, I’ll register to run the Vermont 50km trail race, heaven help me. I think I’m going to make it a habit. I don’t believe in heaven, but I do believe in what this phrase represents for me: committing to try something that really tests my limits, attempting something that might well be beyond the edge of my ability. Something I can try and even fail at—as long as failure doesn’t lead to outright catastrophe.
When I talked about entropy in my first post, the one kind of entropy I didn’t name is probably the most obvious: aging. Aging is a part of my world now. I have finally realized that, indeed, I do need more recovery time than when I was younger, and I do lose muscle mass seemingly overnight if I don’t keep up with training. I am very aware, probably for the first time in my life, of the personal, private, and not-so-private entropy of age. During the pandemic, I reached what someone I know calls a significantieth birthday. I like this term a lot because it suggests that when someone asks your age, the answer is significanty. So, yeah, I am significanty years old. Entropy is my buddy.
But I’ve noticed with a kind of pleasant surprise that, in my first year of being significanty, rather than ease up, I have been seeking out greater physical challenges, and pushing for more and more. (A topic perhaps for another post: the challenges are in trail running, a sport that is not new to me but whose role in my life represents a shift in my commitment to rowing, the sport I have been dedicated to for twenty-five years.) Three years ago, I ran a 10km in the mountains of northern Greece. The next year, I did the 25km version. Last year, had there been a race, I was planning to do the 25km again. But this year, when signing up for the mountain trail race again, I thought, heck, I’ve done the 25km. Why not see what else I can do? And I opted for the 44km race. A few days ago, I signed up—heaven help me—to run a 50km trail race in late September.
I ran my last road marathon almost three decades ago. So why now, at 61 years old, do I feel the urge to compete at longer and longer distances on trails with more and more elevation gain (heaven help me)? I think it’s because of a combination of good fitness at my age and my curiosity about where exactly the limits lie for me as time passes. How much can I push back against entropy with each passing year? What does it feel like (literally) to age one more year but/and add another five km to the distance I’ll race? At some point—at what point?—do the numbers stop working? At what point do I have to unwind my strange athletic math and go the other direction: fewer miles with more years of age?
I know that moment is coming. (They don’t call it entropy for nothing.) So part of me wants to do as many challenges as I can before those runs or climbs stop being fun or healthy. It’s like those carnival games where you swing a mallet down onto the pad and make the marker go up the track to reach the bell. I want to swing over and over, making that marker go up higher and higher—25km, 44km, 50km. How high can I go before the forces of gravity start winning?
Maybe I should have done this all in my youth. I would have had potential fitness and recovery speed on my side then, if not the time to train. Let’s not omit the critical fact that these sorts of races require training and it’s easier to train when your children are out of the house or when your career is well established. But it’s not just a matter of having the time now that I’m older. It’s about how, at 61, I think about time. Now that I’m well into the second half of my life, I’m able to contemplate the start of limitations; I’m aware of my mortality. This is why I care all the more about seeing what I can do with the hopefully plentiful time I have left.
As we age, we are supposed to do all sorts things. Some say we’re supposed to slow down and take it easy. Others say we should knock items off our bucket lists (a phrase I detest, by the way, because only in talking about bucket lists do people ever refer to themselves as kicking the bucket!). I have no idea what anybody else should be doing as they age—but I am really interested in hearing what you do or plan to do as you grow older. For me, I’ve discovered this brand new eagerness to push and push to go further and a little further. Soon enough, it will be time for me to accept that there’s a limit to the limits I can test. Until that moment, though, I want to be the person who signs up for things and then says heaven help me.
Henri, I totally get this!! Albeit, not quite at your level, I also find challenges for myself as aging keeps presenting its own challenges. Training for my second half marathon with a specific time goal. Keeps me focused on staying healthy, strong and perhaps in control of part of my life.