My advisor is 20 years older than I am.  The last time I was in a little two mile race on campus, she beat me soundly.  There's another little fun run tomorrow, and if she runs it, I guess I'm going to get hosed again.

I hope she's busy or something...

My birthday was on Monday.  Last year I celebrated by running a half marathon.  I wasn't able to manage that this year, since my ankle was still kind of mad at me from when I fell down.  I'm hoping to go out for a run tomorrow.

I've made it something of a tradition to get out and run on my birthday.  Maybe I'm in denial, but it really is nice to get out and do something on my birthday that I simply couldn't do when I was eighteen.  I will admit that since I was a pretty slothful eighteen year-old, that doesn't take much.

I couldn't run on Monday, but I could lift weights if I kept it to exercises that didn't involve standing.  I came up with the crazy idea that since I was turning 38, I should do 38 reps of everything.

Ow.

You would think I would be old enough to know better by now.

Over at the Science of Sport, they're doing a really neat series on exercise and aging (part 1 and part 2, so far).  You should really take a look at it.  It's a little technical, but completely fascinating.  

I was especially interested in this graph:
 
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_ua8ycqfc4ok/SZKar2RRRcI/AAAAAAAABaQ/vDvPSNdxcCQ/s1600-h/Aging+and+marathon+performance.gif

It's world records for marathon times (in minutes) versus age.  My running career is too short, but I wonder how a typical chart would look if you took an individual's yearly PR for the 5K, for instance, and charted it against age.  Would the curve look similar?  With just one person, you'd have a lot of variability, of course, thanks to injury, waxing and waning interest, etc.

I wonder how I could find a bunch of folks to do this kind of chart for me.  You'd need long-time runners who record their race times.  Hm.