Ten\u00a0years ago\u00a0I\u00a0took up running as a sport, and found that I really liked it. \u00a0I ran two marathons, seven half marathons, and some 10Ks. \u00a0All was good; I was meeting my goals and improving my times, until I\u00a0hurt my knee. \u00a0I had cartilage repair surgery, just before a major study showed that these surgeries worked no better than physical therapy alone. \u00a0Ah well. \u00a0That was five years ago, and I\u00a0had several abortive attempts to start running again, always followed quickly by a re-injury of that knee. \u00a0Finally, a slow and deliberate recovery coupled with weight training of the muscles around the knee allowed a comeback. \u00a0This week I ran my first race in five years – the 3M Half Marathon.<\/p>\n
I wasn’t sure what to expect. \u00a0My goal was to beat 2 hours, so I chose a pace just fast enough to make that time and very carefully stuck to that pace through the whole race. \u00a0I kept waiting to poop out, but the miles went by and I never did. \u00a0My last two miles were my fastest, and I finished the race at 1:58:35. \u00a0That’s only 4 minutes slower than my most\u00a0recent\u00a03M half of five years ago – an acceptable age-related slowdown!<\/p>\n
Incidentally, I ran a 10K five years ago with the goal of running it in my age in minutes, something I\u00a0accomplished to within three seconds. \u00a0For this week’s half marathon I ran two 10Ks back to back, and the second one had a time of 55:11. \u00a0That’s 30 seconds faster than my age! \u00a0I’m back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ten\u00a0years ago\u00a0I\u00a0took up running as a sport, and found that I really liked it. \u00a0I ran two marathons, seven half marathons, and some 10Ks. \u00a0All was good; I was meeting my goals and improving my times, until I\u00a0hurt my knee. \u00a0I had cartilage repair surgery, just before a major study showed that these surgeries worked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":473,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions\/473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lithoguru.com\/life\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}