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Adam’s training journal
Running geek that I am, I was studying my old training logs the other day and noticed — not for the first time — a disturbing trend. Charting my marathon performances between ages 30 and 40, I found that my times during the first half of the decade got consistently faster, while my times over the past five years have begun to ebb.
Well, duh, you say. Welcome to the real world, Peter Pan.
Still, as I broke down the data (I told you I was a geek), I saw outliers in the data. For instance, from ages 35 to 38, my times got steadily slower, but at 39, I logged my best times — by a significant margin — in four years. And my time at this year’s windy Oklahoma City Memorial Marathon, my first race as a “master,” was only three minutes slower than what I’d run as a mere pup of 30 under ideal conditions when I set my personal record at the time at the 1998 Dallas White Rock Marathon.
Watching the Olympic swimming trials this month, I saw 41-year-old Dara Torres blow a bunch of teens and twentysomethings out of the water as she qualified for the U.S. team. And at 45, Jamie Moyer is helping anchor the pitching rotation of my beloved Philadelphia Phillies as they (knock wood) make a run on what I hope will be their first World Series appearance in 15 years.
Obviously, at some point we need to begin conceding seconds and minutes to aging. But when does the clock begin to strike midnight for our bodies?
