July 2021 will mark 5 years since I started running. I was 46, a 'master's' runner, when I began my couch-to-5k program with Runnymede Runners at Windsor Great Park. It was a pretty big group that met at the Savill Garden car park 3 times a week to alternate run/walk in a big long line. If you got to the front during the run phase, you'd curl back around in the opposite direction and go to the back of the line until it was time to walk again. This was repeated as many times, on as many days, as needed, to get to the point where you were running the whole 5k. I was pleased in those days to do an easy 5k in 37 minutes, noting to myself that it wasn't hard if you just paced yourself.
Now I'm 51 and I feel like I've come through a big string of personal bests and fitness improvements that were massive, but also due to my age that I'm angling back down to where I was at the start of the c25k journey, noting often to myself these days that 'I'm just glad that I can run'.
In 5 years I've overcome IT band pain, runner's knee, Morton's neuroma, and shin splints, all of which felt fairly major, and took me out for at least one three week period at a time. Each time I got back to running I told myself 'I'm just glad that I can run, no matter what the pace, it's the fact that I'm running that matters, because it feels so good.'
So, in a way, not much has changed. For example, during today's recovery run, in which I honestly felt that I could not have run much faster, I did about a 12 minute/mile pace, about the same pace as my first 5k. The difference now is that I labeled today's run a 'recovery run' because yesterday I did a 'lactate threshold interval' run, in which you maintain your 10 mile race pace for 12-14 minutes during a 10k run. It was tough but very do-able, and my pace alternated between 7 minute/mile and 10 minutes/mile.
Earlier in the week I had done some intervals at the track. A couple of days before that I did some long very slow running around Swinley Forest in preparation for my upcoming Race to the Stones. Now I'm doing ultras and have both marathons and half marathon races to run by the end of the summer. And I'm supposed to be racing 5ks every so often on some Wednesdays with my now exclusive club Bracknell Forest Runners (though I'm still bolstered by lots of kudos from by old running buddies in Runnymede).
Strava tells me I've done 1220 runs to accumulate 7500 miles in my 5 five years.
But it still really just boils down to that one truth: 'I'm just glad I can run'
