The problem with older runners...

"Your brain doesn't know what your body can't do. You still think you're 19, and your body is willing to listen to your body and pretend that it hasn't aged. But if you let it, you'll get injured. And my goal is to get your running without getting hurt."

With that perfect answer to the question, "What's the toughest thing about coaching old-fart runners?" Ric Rojas became my first real track coach.

I sent him my payment and the next week we sat down and mapped out a training schedule. I was bursting at the seams with excitement.

Granted the training looked daunting, 3 days a week of running plus an additional day of sprint conditioning. But it wasn't the time commitment that worried me. It was the actual running. Long distance running.

"We need to get you a base of conditioning," Ric explained.

That in no way assuaged my anxiety when I saw things like 2-mile warm up run... considering that I don't think I've EVER run more than 1/2 a mile and, again, that was THIRTY YEARS AGO!

But, considering that one of my training goals was dropping about 15 pounds of body fat so I could have a better strength to weight ratio for sprinting, I thought, "Hey, for all I know I'll like it," and I added the long-distance running schedule to my PDA's calendar.

And so it begins...

Just as I'm about to dig into a hearty breakfast burrito for brunch, my friend TDK strolled in to the restaurant in his usual running and/or biking gear. It was a rainy-ish, cold-ish day, and TDK looked elated.

"I just won my first 5k race!"

"SWEET!" I answered and we high-fived, of course.

After chatting about the race for a bit, I said, "I always loved the idea of being a runner, but I was always a sprinting guy, not a running guy."

"Well, there's a coach here in town who coaches Masters sprinters."

"Oh...?"

Now, let's be clear. I haven't sprinted since I was 15 or 16. And then, I was cut from the sprinting group and sent to do pole vault, partly because of my gymnastics background and partly because all the other sprinters in high school became 6'2", while I stayed put at about 5'5" on a tall day.

And, once I started doing gymnastics full time, my running career ended.

Once, during college, when I was late for a class, I went whipping by a couple of guys on the football team who later caught up with me and said, "You're pretty fast. If you've got good hands, you should come play ball."

They spent the next hour extolling the virtues and thrills of catching a good pass and running it into the endzone... but never mentioned words like "hurt", "pain" or "broken."

I passed.

But since I turned 30 (15+ years ago) and stopped tumbling thanks to a torn meniscus (note to self: when doing somersaults, don't land and twist at the same time), I've been looking for something to do that my body enjoys and can actually do.

So, I took the name of this coach, finished my burrito (delicious, btw) and headed home.