Getting old isn’t always a great thing. 🙂 After you reach certain age milestones, it can actually get, well, old! Of course, with running, it can be nice as getting older means new age groups and, very importantly, slower qualifying times for the Boston Marathon!
Running My Age for My Birthday
Something a friend introduced me to years ago that I have not done in a while actually can make you realize how old you are! It is running your age and that is what I did this year.
If you want to try something like this as well, you can run your age in miles, run your age in kilometers (what I did this year), or even run your age in decimals! If you are 37 (like me), you could run 3.7 miles!
In fact, the last time I did this was probably about 4 years ago because I have either been training for a race, not feeling well, horrible weather, or something else. This year, I woke up and thought that it would be nice to go out and get it done this year!
Not 37 Miles – 37 Kilometers! 🙂
Now, I am in Europe so I went ahead and did the kilometer version of my age instead of the mile version. 🙂 While I was actually wanting to run the 37 miles to match my new age, I didn’t have time for that this year so instead converted it from 37 kilometers to 22.991 miles – or 23 miles to make it nice and round. 🙂
The fun part for this year was that I have not done much running since my marathon in January. In fact, the most I have run in a single week had been 25 miles so I knew that running 23 miles just in the spur of the moment was going to be a bit challenging.
Still, I have always said that I know I could run a marathon distance (26.2 miles) any day, it would just take me longer on some days!
Beautiful Weather and a Great Run!
I ended up having an actually beautiful morning (I did this yesterday, March 25, instead of on my actual birthday today because of scheduling things) with the sun up and temperature around 50 degrees. It did get up to 68 degrees before the end but that was ok still.
My out and back route for my 23 mile birthday run
I did an out and back and ran through some villages and into the city. March 25 in Greece is Independence Day so it meant that the villages were all set up for parades and the roads were pretty quiet. That made for a very nice, relaxing combination!
Because I had not been running much, I was just going to go with feel and not really try for any particular time. So, I was quite surprised when I finished my 23 miles in a time of 2 hours and 57 minutes or just 8:59 per mile! All in all, I had a really fun run and am already looking forward to turning 42 so I can run an actual marathon distance for my birthday run!
Suffice it to say, I am feeling my new age a bit more thanks to this run! 🙂
