I treated myself with my first real track workout since I was on a track team. While I am most certainly not dead yet, and even feel happy, it’s my own little memento mori that I can say I haven’t tried this in 25 years.
Not What I Looked Like
The workout:
One warmup lap around the track (quarter-mile)
Stretching
Simple hurdle drills (mostly trailing-leg over for a few hurdles worth)
Practice short hurdle sprints (four hurdles), moderately hard and working on remembering form – about 6-10 reps.
Half-length (55m) hurdle sprints – 4 reps?
Two-lap (half-mile) cooldown run
Not a monster workout, but enough. Even though I had the hurdles set low and I’m only five-stepping them, it felt pretty good. My daughter wants to know when I will put the hurdles up to Olympic height and three-step them. I have no idea when (or if) that is going to happen, but it feels like something I still could do if I would just invest in some practice and conditioning.
Last night, I finally made it to the local soccer game that the kids have been going to. And joined in… besides some of the kids from their soccer league, their coaches plus various older kids (high school and college) and young adults are there. Plus a few (ahem) “mature” guys, like moi.
Wow, I am out of shape.
But I persevered. Gasped for breath a bit, like an old John Denver song:
Breathin’ like a freight train Don’t know when I’ll get up again…
One of the college guys was kind enough to ask how I was doing —
“Pain?”
There was, of course, only one appropriate answer:
Well. I had a definite “how did I get this old so soon?” moment this week.
At our homeschooling co-op, this semester there is a fencing class. The instructor knows that, back in the day, I did a bit of fencing. So, this week he says to me “Come on, Zach — my equipment’s your size, you can suit up and help give the kids a workout.”
How could I resist?
But, then I made my mistake. I started to make my disclaimer, that I hadn’t actually fenced épée much ever, and beside, I hadn’t actually been in a bout since …
And realized that the correct ending of that sentence was “… since before any of you kids were born.”
Ah, well. As the saying goes, “old age and treachery beat youth and skill every time.” The results? Let’s just say that for these young padawans, “much to learn, you still have.”
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