Running in 2019

It’s been a funny year for running. By any measure a really successful one; I ran further than I did the year before (+112%), I set personal bests for both the 5K (17:49) and half marathon (84 minutes), and remained pretty much injury free.

However all of this success came in the first half of the year, and, as the decade closed, I felt less fit than I did in 2018.

This feeling of malaise led to me to re-read Haruki Murakami’s ‘What I talk about when I talk about running’. I was in my mid twenties when I first read it, and while I enjoyed reading about his life and approach to running, the thoughts on running and getting older were kind of lost on me. As you can probably imagine, reading it a decade later felt a lot different. Despite being two months younger than Eliud Kipchoge, I feel like my best days are behind me, and so Murukami’s mantra of acceptance and trying to be “quicker than you were yesterday” was good tonic.

Speaking on Kipchoge, I bought a pair of Nike’s controversial VaporFly Next%. Maybe Nike will keep making us all faster anyway?