I've been running for 26 years now

One morning early last November, I went for a long run with Old Man Run Club. OMRC is not, as its name seems to suggest, made up primarily of old men. In fact, among the 100 or so runners who showed up that Saturday, I was one of just a handful of geezers. The vast majority of the group looked under 40, trim, well-dressed, and—make of this what you will—Asian. As a 50-year-old white boy, I fit in perfectly.

We took off west from along 23rd Street, turned left at some point (Eighth? Ninth?), and jogged on past Canal Street down into Tribeca. There were a lot of us, and though we all tried to stick together, red lights cut sub-groups off from the main. Still, someone always knew where we were going, and after we crossed the Manhattan Bridge into Brooklyn, we paused to let the whole crew reconnect. Then we kept going.

I felt great! Energetic, light on my feet, in reasonably good shape. I wasn’t leading the pack, but I could stay near the front, and even after 10 miles I didn’t feel particularly tired. This was good: All those years of consistent running—waking up early, getting out in nasty weather, pushing myself in general—meant I could just do this.

Then, as we headed toward the BQE on Flushing Avenue, I spotted a ring of plastic directly ahead of me. You know those strips they use to seal large cardboard boxes? Yeah, it was one of those, and before I had a chance to think, I was putting my right foot smack in its center—hoping I could toe in and toe out in a millisecond. Instead, the ring wrapped itself around my foot, and as I tried simultaneously to keep running and to kick it off, my left foot got wrapped inside it as well. I’d been snared. I went down, hard, landing with all my weight on my right shoulder. I hope it at least looked as dramatic as it felt, but the crash was probably anticlimactic: a small middle-aged man falling over quickly but quietly.

People stopped to check on me. I sat there a moment, trying to assess my injuries. I could move my arm. I hadn’t hit my head. I hadn’t twisted anything. I wasn’t bleeding much. I hurt, but I was okay.

I stood up, shook it off, and walked to the corner. OMRC was going left, up toward Williamsburg. I turned right, as I’d planned to, and jogged home, a little slower than before, but not much.

Still, I was shaken. I’d been running since roughly 1999, and in all those years I’d only tripped twice—once in June of 2023, when I broke a finger, and now again. Again! Was I getting old? Sloppy? Had my luck simply run out?

In the months since that accident, I’ve been reflecting on my running life: I was never destined to become a runner, I got to the sport too late in some ways, and recent years have only heightened my sense of both how long I’ve been doing this and how it barely feels like any time at all. When I hit 20 years, I wrote this piece about what I’d learned, and now, six years later, I feel like it’s worth adding to. So here goes!

I mean, duh. When I wrote that 20-year story, I was 44, which is the age at which, according to a study released last summer, the human body tends to go through a lot of dramatic changes. And soon after that, I started to get injured a lot. Nothing terrible, just the chronic injuries that can start piling up when your body can’t repair itself quite as fast as it used to. I’d have six or seven good months of running, and then weird knee pain or a tweaked psoas muscle would put me out of commission for three months. Then it would happen again.

One doctor gave me a cortisone shot, which worked like magic. For a while. Another doc gave me a set of boring, easy exercises to do—crab walks, knee bends, planks—that I came to think of as my “old man workout.” (The email he sent me had all the YouTube and Amazon links I’d need.) And yet, since I started doing those exercises regularly, I haven’t experienced any of the nagging, chronic injuries that used to sideline me. Just the odd dramatic tumble.

The thing is, I used to take dramatic tumbles all the time, back when I was a skateboarder. If you ask my friends from high school, I believe they’ll tell you I was in fact known for my tendency to slam extremely hard—on half-pipes, down sets of stairs, off loading docks. I spent most of my teenage years scraped and bruised (my right hip was once so purple it was green), but it never really bothered me. I kept going, which turned out to be great training for running, where you’re always working through some level of pain.

The difference now—and again this is a big duh—is that it takes so much longer to recover from injuries both grand and minuscule. Five, ten years ago, a night’s sleep would do it. Now it might be days before a tweaked thigh heals. Although the OMRC crash didn’t stop me from running, I remained creaky for months afterward—it wrecked me more I thought at the time.

The worst part of this is that although my body is telling me to slow down, my mind wants to remain as active as ever. And the irony of that is that this is what I trained my mind to do! Twenty-six years of running taught me to push through any obstacle—if I could consciously make my body keep going, my body would respond and grow stronger. Now my brain is sending the same signals, but my body can’t or won’t do what it used to. Should I de-train my mind, so that it asks less now of my body? Or do I keep shouting inwardly at my heart, lungs, and legs, hoping some percentage of that exhortation breaks through?

Christ, can I stop complaining for a minute? By almost every measure, I remain in very good shape, and while I know I’m slower than I used to be, I am still decently fast. Over the past two years, I’ve been working on pushing my 1-mile time faster and faster, with some real success whenever I’ve been able to keep up the training. (Life has a way of getting in the way, y’know?) So what if my half-marathons are a couple of minutes slower than they used to be? So what if I need two days of rest after a big workout instead of one? I’ve reached the point where the goal is to take it all easier and enjoy myself; after 26 years, I think I’ve earned that.

And maybe my body hasn’t changed much in this post-44 era. Last night, for instance, I raced a 5K at Prospect Park, and then woke up this morning to go running again, with one of my company’s vendors visiting from Florida. Was I tired? A little, I guess, but not exceedingly so, and even if I was, my well-trained brain knew I could keep going—and for once, and hopefully not the last time, my body agreed.

Last Sunday, my run crew—the Not Rockets—and I jogged out to Coney Island to race a 5K along the shore. This was just a middle-school fund-raiser, but for us it was an excuse to run through a new-to-us part of Brooklyn and to test ourselves at the end. Plus, entrants got a free slice of pizza and a ticket to Deno’s Wonder Wheel! As swag goes, that’s better than a T-shirt (which we also got).

The course was straightforward: an out-and-back on the path leading toward the Verrazzano Bridge. There was a strong headwind for the first half, so a strong tailwind the second. I took it easy, partly because I wanted to but mostly because there was no other way. This wasn’t my fastest finish, but at least I ran each mile faster than the last.

The coolest part was that, as a team, we ruled. Three of us won age-group medals, and one—Emily—got first in her group. Yes, I know this was hardly an elite event, but it was incredibly gratifying to see this crew, which I’ve been keeping together for a decade or more, achieve something tangible together. I won’t say it brought tears to my eyes—I was too dehydrated for that, anyway—but I think I almost maybe sort of felt something.

Likewise, at the 5K last night, I bumped into a friend and her 13-year-old daughter, who’s on her school track team and now crazy about running. She was going for a PR, hoping to break 24 minutes, so I offered to pace her. We ran together almost the whole way, one of us occasionally ahead of or behind the other, and while she kept me from overexerting myself, I kept her pushing ahead. She nailed that PR by more than 90 seconds—and won her age group.

So, is this my future? Will I become Coach Matt, taking pride in my crew’s achievements will giving up on my own? Not yet, I don’t think, but if my own PRs are on hold for a while, this ain’t a bad substitute.

Yeah, that never goes away. There’s always some cool new shirt, some shoe technology, some smartwatch innovation that gets me excited. I may not have a dozen pairs of shoes lining the hallway anymore, but that doesn’t mean I don’t wish I did.

After my bout with skin cancer (malignant melanoma) a few years ago, I’ve become very careful about protecting myself. I use an SPF50 moisturizer on my face every day, always wear a running hat, and pick routes with good shade. (Mornings tend to have a lower UV index, too.) Lately, I’ve found some long-sleeved running shirts that happen to be ultralightweight—I don’t sweat any more in them than I would in a tee. Now I know I should’ve been doing this all along.

Now you know it, too.

I’ll try not to get all mushy here, but I still just love running. I love doing it, I love being able to do it, I love how it feels when I’m done. Hell, I love waking up earlier than I want to, unsure of whether I’m really going to get out of the house again, and then finding myself crossing the street in front of my house, hitting the start button on my watch, and throwing myself into an activity that now feels as natural as breathing. The injuries, the aging, the interruptions—they suck, but when I get out there and start moving, they seem to vanish into the distant past.

At the end of this morning’s workout with my Florida visitor, who just started running last July and who has been on a daily streak ever since, he told me, “I never regret going for a run.” With the exception of my recent crashes, I heartily agree. And I hope in 25 years, he’ll feel the same. 🪨🪨🪨