The lies we tell ourselves..

I had planned to do 6 treadmill miles today, but the day was too pretty to stay indoors.

So I jogged my hilly Cornstalk 8.1 mile course. I didn’t bother to time myself as frankly, I didn’t want to know; but the pace was somewhere in the 11:45-12:00 mpm range. It was a slow but easy “lope”.

It was breezy but perfect running weather.

While I was in Bradley Park, the university track team was doing hill repeats. Yep…they blew past me as if I were merely waddling in place. Wait..that is what I was doing.

Now the reality is that our track team is a strong one; I never was nearly as fast as the men NOR the women; my lifetime PB for the 5K is a hair under 19 minutes and for the 10K: 39:50. That is “young man slow”, compared to serious runners. I last broke 20 minutes for the 5K in 1998. Today’s run: same effort would have been perhaps 1:05 and change.

Now: I am “old man slow” and “old man slow” is slower than “young man slow”. That is really it.

The same goes with the weight room: I never was “strong”; lifetime PB for the bench press was 310, but that was at a much heavier body weight than I am now. At my current bodyweight (or within shouting distance of it), we are talking 260 lbs. Now I do 200 on a good day. That is “young man weak” vs. “old man weak”. 🙂

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