End of a Decade

Tomorrow I turn 60. Right now I'm not too excited about that, but I'll get over it. Birthday's haven't bothered me since I turned 30, but 60 is hitting me hard. Oh, well. I started running 10 years ago, so that I could run a marathon to celebrate turning 50. I never anticipated where that would take me. Of course I have to run a marathon as a 60 year old! I once saw a woman at the Twin Cities Marathon who was in the 75-79 age group. What a pair of legs she had. She is my inspiration for continuing to run marathons. Her name is Joy and she's from Los Gatos. There was a mention about her in Runners World last fall. I've decided to run the Paso Robles Marathon, which is at the end of October. Now I just need to register, ha, ha. I started training this week. My girlfriends are running New York, which is the week after Paso, so we'll be training together. We have a three day a week plan, with cross training on three other days. The race is in 17 weeks. The highest mileage is 33 miles per week, which is low, but I'm hoping with the strength training and cycling I'll be fine. Yesterday I ran a 5K, finishing in 33:18 (Garmin time). I wasn't too thrilled with that finish, but looking back at 2005 and 2006 5Ks, I'm about 3 minutes faster. Of course, I would prefer to be running sub-30 minutes. But this was my last race in this age group. (Did I mention I'm turning 60 tomorrow?) While cleaning up the other day, I found an old receipt and realized I've been doing Personal Training for a year now. I did it to make me a better runner, but my mileage has been so low that it didn't seem to have much of an impact. Hopefully I'll see the payoff during my marathon training. Tomorrow is my first long run--8 miles. We're heading out at 6 a.m. I'm having a birthday party tomorrow night, so I'm going to have to take a nap in order to stay awake past 8 p.m.! Have a great weekend, everybody!