I’ve been training to run the New York City Marathon on Sunday. At age 70, even in the best conditions, it would be a slog over 26.2 miles, longer than five hours. That is less a time for a race than a recipe for short ribs.
There is no such thing as an athlete aging gracefully, my physical therapist has long reminded me. Last week, I aggravated a hip injury. It’s not the finish I’m worried about now. I may not even reach the start.
Either way, this was likely to be my last marathon. I’m old and slow, increasingly broken down despite diligent strength training. These days, I’m running nearly two hours behind my personal best of 3 hours 57 minutes. My finishing time for a half marathon in September was listed as “ticketed for loitering.”
I feel enormously frustrated at possibly having to drop out of New York at the last minute after months of training. But I’m also weirdly amused at the arbitrary timing of the injury — a mile into an easy five-mile run — and curiously accepting of whatever happens on Sunday.
Perhaps because I’m a reporter, I view the setback with some detachment. I turned 70 with a dispassionate, almost clinical, interest in what happens next. It is an age when careers have been made, children have grown, retirement beckons to those who haven’t yet embraced it. Our athletic careers have been shelved in dusty remembrance. Our bodies have weakened. But the thrill of unexpected possibility still awaits.
As septuagenarians, we are free now from society’s expectations. We have escaped the gravitational pull of prescribed lives into a beckoning orbit, floating untethered from assumption and likelihood.
If this marathon goes sideways, I’ll still be left with a feeling of gratitude. I’m much fitter at 70 than I was at 25, when I weighed 240 pounds. I lost 70 pounds in 1980 and began running, renewing an active life that had gone dormant after high school.
This marathon would be my sixth in New York and ninth overall. My heart rate registers between 45 and 50 beats a minute; 60 to 100 is normal. My cardiologist gave me the go-ahead for this race, saying, “There’s not many people nearing their eighth decade that can walk to the supermarket, much less run a marathon.”
Concessions, of course, have been made to age.
I get injected every six months with lubricant to cushion my knees. It’s made from rooster combs, giving me an insatiable desire to get up at dawn and wake the whole neighborhood. I’ve also begun wearing impossibly cushioned shoes. I think the brand name is Bouncy Castle. And, too, I wear compression socks to the knees, giving the vague impression of an aging waiter at Oktoberfest.
After 40-plus years of running, I still make rookie mistakes. In March, I wore a pair of brand-new shoes and ran 10-plus miles until both calves seized up. The injury cost me nearly two months of serious training. My physical therapist got me back on my feet with dry needling, a cousin of acupuncture, which made my calves twitch like frogs’ legs in high school biology.
In recent weeks, my therapist has also been dry needling my inflamed hips. For months, I’ve rolled my aching legs over a lacrosse ball daily, trying to unkink knots in the muscles. It is a sensation sometimes so torturous that I’m pretty sure I confessed to spying for East Germany while in middle school.
“I’ve got you,” my therapist says in encouragement.
Even her expert treatment, though, may not be enough.
If I can’t run on Sunday, I’ve still enjoyed this training cycle perhaps more than any other. Long a night owl, I became an early bird, up at 4 on many mornings. I relished the disruptions of silence and darkness — low music from distant cars, the aurora borealis of reflective running vests on other early risers in my suburban Philadelphia neighborhood, squirrels quacking like ducks during mating season.
During water stops at my local Wawa, I got recharged by watching the intricate do-si-do steps and hearing pleasant “thank yous” as customers held the maze of doors for each other as if changing partners in a square dance.
When my work as a sports reporter took me abroad over the summer, I inevitably encountered small kindnesses. A family handed me a bottle of water from a backpack during a parched run in Warsaw. After an 18-mile run in Paris during the Olympics, my taxi driver helped revive me with the arias of Edith Piaf. In the middle of a war in Ukraine, convenience-store hot dogs were decorated with smiley faces of mayonnaise.
I hesitated to run there at first, given the frequent air-raid alerts. Roughly 500 top-level Ukrainian athletes and coaches have died in the war. Grief and exhaustion consume the country. But resilience and defiance have helped to subdue the abnormal into the normal: going to work, shopping, taking children to the park, even jogging.
“If we quit training every time we hear a missile alert,” a Ukrainian Olympic high jumper, Oleh Doroshchuk, told me, “we would have no lives.”
My hips are a frivolous concern by comparison. If I don’t run any more marathons, I can still say that I ran one in 2015 in North Korea. The race began and ended in a stadium filled with 50,000 people, and absent portable toilets on the course, pit stops were offered in a karaoke bar. And I can say I ran New York five times, including 2019, the only race where I’ve ever been high-fived by a cat.
I can still run neighborhood turkey trots, maybe even half marathons, inspired by a quote I saw recently from Henry Kozlowski, who, at 74, has run all 46 Chicago Marathons. It was his way, he told The Chicago Tribune, “to fight my battle against chronology.”
“I intend to live forever,” Kozlowski said, “or die trying.”
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