Ageing In The Age Of Strava

RECENTLY MY BUDDY Sean sent a text message that said, “Been running a lot of 5:30–6:00 kays early. It feels pretty nice at that pace.”

- Jeff Dengate

I replied, “Oh, man. Easy runs can never be too slow. That’s floaty heaven right there.”

It is. Though maybe not for me.

Let me explain. But first, I want to make it clear that I’m not pace-shaming anybody here. I think all running speeds are relative, and we all have our moments of ‘fast’ and, well... ‘not’. But for a long time, my ‘easy’ pace has generally hovered somewhere around five minutes. That dates back to when I was a kid in the ‘late 1900s’ (as I’ve been told the younger generation refers to it). You find the rhythm that just feels so damn good, so effortless that you’re confident you could hold it all day without ever tiring. The numbers on your watch don’t matter, right?

But it’s the numbers part that’s killing me. On days that I craved that ‘floaty heaven’, when I was run down from marathon training or just a bit sluggish from too many beers the night before, I’d find myself pushing too hard – because I knew when I uploaded the run to Strava, others would see it and be judging me.

Would they really? Doesn't matter. In my head, they were. Are. And no matter how I tried to talk myself into anything else reasonable, I was always going to have some internal pressure to shoot down the road just a bit faster.