The Old Runner

We chose this week to visit my daughter and her family at their house in Connecticut so we could run the Fairfield Half Marathon. Of course, we're always excited to visit our kids and grandkids but if we can also fit a race into the visit that's an extra bonus, and this looked like a good one. Linda also ran the half marathon and did great. It was our 34th wedding anniversary and neither of us would have dreamed 34 years ago that we'd run a half marathon at this stage of our life. Hope we can do it for our 50th anniversary too, but that's a while away, and by that time maybe a 5k will be a challenge. Now in its 33rd year, this is a great event. Since 1994 Runners World has listed it among the best races in the country, and it's been host to the National Masters Championship as well as the U.S. Women's National Half Marathon Championship. For me personally, I loved the race and the beautiful course but my diet for the week leading up to the race was a disas...

This race seemed to have a lot more hills than I'm accustomed to, or maybe I just wasn't feeling great. As we stood at the starting line, the lady in charge of the timing announced that if anybody wanted to change races between the 10k and 5k, that we should just let her know when we finish so she could change her records. That's all the incentive I needed to switch from the 10k that I had signed up for to the 5k. Even running half the distance it seemed to me that it would never end, and I could only imagine how things would have ended up if I would have run the longer distance. My video glasses are falling apart but fortunately they're still working, so I managed to get my viewpoint of the race on video. I'm including a few photos here and on my Facebook page I created a public photo gallery that you should be able to view. Click here for my Facebook photo gallery . I spent the entire race chasing fellow Gaston County Runner Michael Hershman. This...

This was my fourth year in a row to run my hometown half marathon. I invited some of the Gaston County Runners to run it, assuring them it was one of the best half marathons they'd find anywhere. They took the bait, and I still believe that's true, but they generally wanted to flog me after the race since I tend to downplay  the hills in this race. I know there are a bunch of hills -- I have to run them too -- but I guess I don't notice them as much in this race as in others. Less than a mile from the start we passed the spot where I lived 50 years ago in 1963. The old house is now gone and it's just an empty lot, but I get goose bumps just imagining myself in a time warp, seeing me then and seeing me now. There have been a few rough spots along the way, but as I have gotten older life has been much kinder to me than I ever thought it would be. After the rocky start I had in life, just the reminder that I've made it to a ripe old age without being dead or in pri...