Beating my Age

I promise I will soon write a blog post that doesn’t mention my heart attack, but this isn’t the one! Pre heart attack I always did a 10km run just after my birthday. This was to make sure I could do it in a time that was under my age in minutes. I did it with ease every year but it was still a nice benchmark to have.

Obviously I wasn’t doing this when I was 25 years old as that really would have been impressive, but it’s something I’ve been doing throughout my 40’s. As I was 50 at the end of last year that meant a sub 50 minute 10km. The first one I did after my birthday was pretty slow at 48:18, but it wasn’t really planned and was part of a longer ½ marathon run. I soon improved on that though with a more representative time of 43:31 – well inside my target of 50 minutes..

However, I’ve since had a heart attack which resulted in ‘significant cardiac damage’, two stents and a lot of down time in order to recover from the ordeal. Needless to say, none of this is conducive to setting decent 10km running times. Having gradually built things up over the past 4 months I’m pleased to say that I did a sub 50 minute 10km this morning. It was in a time 49:44 to be precise.

I’m not going to say it was easy, and I only just snuck under the 50 minute threshold. If I hadn’t been wind assisted for the last ½ mile it may have been a different story. However, it’s good to know that despite the heart attack and medications that I’m on my benchmark of beating my age in minutes for a 10km is still be achievable. It’s definitely more of a challenge now. I guess that means it has more significance than it did when it was all too easy.!

Tags: running