Even professional athletes and ballet dancers – people with demanding daily training regimens and access to the latest science on nutrition and exercise – eventually slow down. So it’s not surprising that the rest of us are unlikely to turn in new athletic personal bests as we get older, regardless of how hard we work.
For someone like me who “competed” in road races I’d never win, it was often fun to try to beat my previous best times. But that doesn’t work too well after a certain age. I now run 5K at a slower pace than I used to run 10K.
Just trying to beat last year’s race time may be unrealistic – or will be soon. I was thrilled when I equaled my 2022 5K time in 2023, but this training season my Garmin fitness watch tells me in multiple ways that I’m slowing down.
I needed some inspiring new goals for this new stage of life.
New goals
A 5K isn’t exactly a marathon, so “finishing” didn’t feel very compelling.
The good news is that it’s a lot more fun to compete against my age group now than when I was younger. I was a slower than average runner in my 20s. Now I guess a lot of the people who used to be faster than me don’t run anymore. Or if they do, they’ve also slowed down.
I came up with what I hoped were stretch-but-theoretically-possible goals for yesterday’s Jack’s Abby United Way 5K:
Finish in the top third of my age group, which is 60-69. I’d like to point out here that my doctor told me that to be fair, that group really ought to be split in two, because a lot of physical changes happen in your 60s. It’s no coincidence that the top four finishers in my group last year were 61 or 62. Fact is, the difference between someone just out of their 50s and someone almost 70 is considerable. And I’m closer to 70 than 59.
Finish with a faster time than a linear regression of all women’s results would predict, looking at age vs time. (Hey, I spent some years analyzing data for a living. #DataNerd)
Finish better than my worst 5K of the past few years, which was a leisurely 11:31 minutes/mile in 2019. That was in the MetroWest Corporate 5K, which was on a weekday evening after I’d worked a full day.
Finish in the top half of women overall.
I achieved all of those last year and was hopeful for yesterday . . . but I hadn’t counted on the weather.
Racing on a cold, rainy morning
After more than 28 straight days without rain, it was around 57°F with steady rain yesterday during this year’s race. Sigh. I braced myself for my time to be slower than last year, and it was: I ended up finishing almost 2 minutes behind than last year, at a pace that was 34 seconds/mile off my results in both 2023 and 2022. How much of that was due to conditions vs I’m getting slower, I don’t know.
I did beat my slow 2019 time of 11:31 minutes/mile, though, at 11:14/mile. And, I squeezed into the top third of my age group, finishing 4th out of 12.
Overall, I was 106 out of 179 women racers, no longer in the top half of finishers. Oh well. (I still finished faster than 68 women younger than me, though.)
And, I was faster than a linear regression line would have predicted for me.
Given all the many things that can go wrong at this stage of life, I’m grateful I can run at all. Now that the race is over, I take back what I thought beforehand, that finishing isn’t a compelling goal. Given the conditions, I’m proud I completed the course. I’ll cherish this year’s “finisher’s medal.” Even if I was slow.
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