Do not go gentle

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

The poet Dylan Thomas wasn’t a runner, but he would have fit in with the sub-masters running crowd fighting the tide towards 40.

Youth is wasted on the young, the cliche goes

For runners, this means feet fluttering wildly, Achilles tendons stretching smoothly, hamstrings unfurling without a notion that they could pop. Raging without a sense of limits or reason. As I age, I understand the young runner’s insatiable desire to always go faster as what it really is: a recipe for frustration and fatigue. Overtraining and injury, depletion and depression.

The old runner may lament that aging saps him of strength, but I see too few fighting, truly battling against the tides of time.

The young runner thinks that if some is good, Pre would say to do more. Frank Shorter would probably still be out there on the roads, and Gerry Lindgren succeeded by never stopping. It takes experience to see that success in running is about riding that edge without cresting, matching the motivation to push with the maturity to stop. But the young runner knows no line. I thought I just needed to want it badly enough. If only the…