LATE EXPECTATIONS
WE CAN’T OUTRUN AGE, BUT FINDING THE COURAGE TO STAY IN THE RACE WILL MAKE YOU A WINNER IN SO MANY WAYS, FINDS RICHARD ASKWITH
‘HAVE YOU BEEN WATCHING THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS?’ A FRIEND ASKED ME LAST SUMMER. ‘ WATCHING?’ I REPLIED. ‘I WA S COMPETING.’
She peered anxiously at my face, as if she suspected dementia. Then I clicked. She was talking about the World Championships in Eugene, Oregon. For me, however, there will from now on be only one world championships: the World Masters – and, in particular, the World Masters Athletics Championships held in Tampere, Finland, in July 2022, where I really did race.
I was barely more qualified to do so than I would have been to run in Oregon. I’m just an ordinary recreational runner: more than a jogger, I hope, but less than an athlete. I do, however, have a birth certificate that showed me last summer to be 62 years old. And because there are no qualifying standards in Masters athletics – inclusiveness is a core value – that was all I needed to join an official Masters club (Midland Masters AC) and, in due course, to register as a representative of Great Britain and sign up to compete in Finland.
Well, not quite all. I also needed to fork out over £100 in entry fees, spend £50 on the bare minimum of official Great Britain Masters kit, pay my own travel expenses and take time off work; none of which I could really afford. Normally, such costs act as a filter – who would be dumb enough to waste so much time and money for the sake of certain humiliation?
For me, however, it was worth it. I had developed in recent years a rather obsessive interest in the way that growing older was affecting me as a runner, and somehow this ridiculous sporting adventure felt like the logical conclusion of a long, liberating journey. This challenge, I told myself, would mark my definitive transition from being a runner who struggled miserably with ageing into an altogether more positive creature: an enthusiastic late-life runner with dreams in his head and hope in his heart.
That journey had begun in my late fifties, when I first began to notice the insidious damage that my advancing years were inflicting on me. Many middle-aged runners will recognise the symptoms. I had less power, less speed, less bounce, less elasticity, less balance, less range of motion – less of all the things that had once made me relatively good at running. All these were normal symptoms of getting older, but what comfort was that? I barely dared race – Iwas too slow. Sometimes, I barely dared train, because I seemed to have lost my resistance to injury. A whole series of injuries – to calf, groin, shoulder, achilles, ribs, hamstring – didn’t even have a discernible cause, apart from the invisible obvious. As the physio who treated my torn calf put it, ‘It’s just age.’
