The Old Runner

The Gate River Run is the largest 15k race in the United States. It's the national 15k championship and there's $80,000 in prize money for American runners, so it attracts some of the best runners in the country. Personally, I'm really partial to smaller races with no more than a couple thousand people. It's nice for there to be enough people to create some excitement, but I don't care for the traffic jams getting to the race expo, the logistics of how to get to and from the huge races, hundreds of people running shoulder-to-shoulder throughout the race, and of course, it's nice to have a chance to place in the top 3 in my age group, which is never going to happen in a race of this magnitude. So with my preference for small races, you may be wondering why I would drive 400 miles to run in a huge race, especially with so many good smaller local races on the same weekend. The reason is that I'm participating in the Running Journal Grand Prix , and the Gate...

The Lung Strong 15k was the final race of the 2008 Run for Your Life Grand Prix, and also the longest race in the RFYL Grand Prix series at 9.3 miles. I’m fine with that distance but before the race I was a little worried about my wife Linda, whose longest previous run (even in training) was 10k (6.2 miles). I’m happy to report that she sashayed through the course without any problems at all, so we both completed the Grand Prix series and ran in every race of the season. If I haven’t mentioned it before, when Linda started running last year shortly after me I had never seen her run at all in our 29 years of marriage. Since then she’s run something like 50 races, which is an amazing accomplishment for a 57-year-old woman whose previous athletic accomplishments could be summed up in two words: mall walker. This morning’s weather was iffy at best. I woke up at 4 a.m. and looked outside to see raindrops bouncing off the pavement. For about 2 seconds I was tempted to go back to bed, but se...