Quantcast
Channel: KentOnline Blogs - Running
Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 20

Age is No Barrier!

0
0

So after last weekend’s achievement by Steve Way, this weekend we “oldies” have a new hero in the form of Jo Pavey, showing that age is no barrier.  At 40 (41 in September and with a ten month old baby) she took bronze at the Commonwealth Games 5,000m - in case you didn’t know!  Jo led for a lot of the race but in the final lap where it looked like it would be a clean sweep for the Kenyans, she found an extra surge on the home straight and crossed the line in third, only narrowly missing out on a silver medal.

It was while she was on the home straight that I found myself shouting at the television (not that this would have helped her)!  Usually when one of our (English/GB) athletes is performing well I find myself forgetting to breathe but I don’t usually get vocal!  As it became clear that she could get a medal, the Hampden Roar was amazing and as many athletes have said, the reaction from the crowd really does give you an extra push. 

Indeed, it happened to me during that morning’s parkrun.  One of the marshals gave me a bit of vocal (polite) encouragement and I consciously put in a bit of extra effort.  At the previous week’s run, one of my fellow runners tried to push me on towards a PB (missed by 2 seconds!).  It’s amazing what support from others can achieve although I obviously wont be getting any Commonwealth medals ;-)

My other inspirations at this weekend’s Commonwealth events included Julius Yego from Kenya who taught himself to throw the javelin by watching YouTube and won the gold medal despite injuring himself during warm up.  And Matthew Dixon, who looks about 8 but is in fact 14, who competed in the Men’s 10m Diving final alongside Tom Daley.  He’s one to watch for the future surely.  But don’t worry, I don’t intend to take up diving or javelin – (a) I don’t like heights and (b) me with a javelin would just be dangerous!

My own sporting achievement this week has been to “play” (and I use that term very loosely) tennis for the first time in probably 35 years!  Now the technique needs a bit of honing – we need to stop allowing the ball to bounce more than once between strokes and a bit of attention is required to ensuring the ball stays within the court – but we did improve over the course of our two sessions. 

The first on the Monday left me with muscle ache where I didn’t know I had muscles just a few hours later and the next morning I was thinking “this must be how people with hip problems feel every day”.  But despite my trepidations for the success of the next day’s parkrun, Friday’s session seemed to have no adverse effects.  I’m hoping all this plyometric work is going to help strengthen my legs for my running but most of all it’s a lot of fun.  I have clients who still play tennis at 70 so there’s hope for me yet!  Hey, another example of age being no barrier J

 

This week sees my first “yoga for runners” session which I’m really looking forward to.  I’m just hoping I’ll be bendy enough to execute some of the positions!

Author's Note : if this blog piece appears to be a bit out of sync timewise, it was published on my wordpress blog of the same name on Sunday morning! 


Viewing all articles
Browse latest Browse all 20

Latest Images

Trending Articles





Latest Images