Running a half-marathon after living a half-century

Supposedly, you get smarter as you get older. But in truth, while wisdom does come age, it is sometimes accompanied by a stunning lack of judgment.

For example, in the middle of a nice hike in the north Georgia mountains with my wife Susan and daughter Allie recently, I wasn’t content to just gaze at the lovely waterfall at the end of the trail. No, I had to go walk across the rocks like I was a mountain goat, not realizing that one of them had apparently been greased with Crisco just before my arrival. I slipped and went down faster than Michael Spinks against Mike Tyson, landing on my shoulder, which I sprained, and on my head, which I’m pretty sure I concussed.

Being a man, I told everyone that I was fine, walked back to the car, drove back home, and quietly cried myself to sleep every night for a week until I went to the doctor and he gave me enough muscle relaxers to subdue King Kong.

I wasn’t going to let that little setback get in the way of more bad judgment, however, which is why a week later I found myself on the streets of Athens in the pre-dawn hours of Sunday morning, getting ready to run a half-marathon with a couple thousand other total morons.

What made me do this? I’d run one before, so what the heck, I figured, I can do it again. Never mind the last time I did it was several years before those jerks at AARP had the nerve to mail me a membership card. For one thing, I resent the implication that I’m old. For another, at my current rate, I’ll be 102 years old (roughly) before I’m able to retire.

But 2014 has been a pretty rough year for me. I’ve had some things happen I never would have imagined, made some dumb decisions and suffered from some pretty back luck, so I figured I was due for something positive, thus my decision to train and complete the torture course known as the Athens Half Marathon.

We started running on Clayton Street in downtown before the sun even came up. I used to run the streets in Athens in the dark quite a bit when I was a student at UGA, but that was something different.

When you do something like run a half-marathon at the age of 50, there are couple of ways to look at it. One is, wow, almost everybody else doing this around me is younger than me, so I should feel pretty proud. And the other way to look at it is, wow, almost everyone else doing this around me is younger than me, so I must be totally insane.

I didn’t run fast. I got passed by a lot of people, including college-age girls, which again – I got pretty used to college girls running from me when I was a student at UGA.

My son David and I ran this race together. Well, not together, exactly. We ran it the same morning. He finished predictably well ahead of me. He had time to go home, shower, make a sandwich and take a nice nap before I finally crossed the finish line. But he isn’t carrying some of the baggage I am, like old injuries, 40 extra pounds and financial burdens. So, on a weighted basis, we probably tied, when you think about it.

The good news is, I finished the race, and with a time of 2 hours and 14 minutes, beat my goal by a minute. At the last part of the run, they let you do a lap inside the country’s greatest college football stadium, and when you finish they give you a bottle of water and one-fourth of a banana. OK, maybe that part wasn’t so great, but I also got an incredible sense of satisfaction. I might be seasoned, I might no longer have the body of an underwear model (Did I ever? I’ll let the reader wonder), and I might not be breaking any Olympic records. But for at least one morning, I felt that maybe I wasn’t over the hill quite yet. That alone convinced that maybe this decision wasn’t a bad one after all.