Why I Ran 29 Miles to Celebrate Turning 29

Outside of my professional life as a lawyer, I am a runner who is trying to run under 2:30 in the marathon. I have been a runner since I was 12 years old, and success to my standards is elusive in a way that success professionally and in other parts of life has not been.

The other day, I ran 29 miles to celebrate turning 29. It’s an annual tradition I started when I turned 27 and occasionally started doing long runs of 24 miles or more. Some people think it’s crazy and kind of a punishment, but I think of it as a celebration of another year of trying to accomplish and push for more.

I ran 27 miles at 27, 28 miles at 28, and 29 miles at 29, which is yet another means of showing me that there are only more barriers to push, that more is possible, and that I am only getting better as a marathon runner. I am in far better shape at 29 than I was at 18 or 21, and am excited about the future.

As a play by play, the run was pretty unexciting and went by pretty fast. I did about 42 loops around a half mile loop and around 7 loops around a mile loop. I did loops the whole time to dodge the hills and because I love to run in circles for long periods of time due to the routine and repetition (just like I love to run 20+ miles on the treadmill at times).

Professionally, I have accomplished a lot in the last seven years since college. I was struggling with some depression during my last year of college, with uncertainty about the future and with personal relationships, but since then, I got married, found a huge network of friends in my area from my old profession of being a teacher, my new profession of being a lawyer, and my network of runners.

I worked six years as a special education teacher in Baltimore City Public Schools, helped a couple hundred high school students graduate, get better grades, and learn to read and write better (but could have done better with a lot of them too). I got a Master’s in Education from a local university (Johns Hopkins), and finished a law degree close to the top of my class while still teaching. I have started my first year as a lawyer at a law firm and am doing my best to learn to be a good junior litigator.

I’m sure almost everyone who has run competitively has a version of these thoughts and sentiments. But no matter how much I accomplish in my life, there is always a part of me that wishes I broke 4:20 in the mile. 15:30 in the 5k. 31 minutes in the 10k. 70 minutes in the half-marathon, 2:30 in the marathon.

None of these are world class times, but personal goals that I have had for a long time. I used to think of this as somewhat unhealthy until I realized it was the fuel and the fire that kept me resilient and balanced in other parts of my life, and the difficulty of running accomplishments compared to professional accomplishments has given me something else to chase when I get too fixated and consumed by professional goals.

Trying to get better at running takes a lot of patience, a lot of very finely tuned, specific workouts, a lot of the right mix of factors lining up, from the course being fast enough, the weather being good enough, and the competition being there to push you.

And then, when and if I break 2:30 in the marathon, I’ll be happy for a couple of days and then gameplan for trying to break 2:25 in the marathon. It is that belief in my capabilities and potential, simultaneous frustration that I’m not hitting that potential, ability to keep trying, and ability to walk away and realize it’s just running and that I have a lot more going for me even if running doesn’t work out that keeps fueling me to move forward.

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When I was in college and before, I used to think that if I wanted to get good at running and push myself in a physical performance capacity, I needed to peak before 32. I thought there was no way I could improve as a runner after 32. I thought that after college, there was likely no way I could run personal records in the 800, mile, and 5k.

This was completely arbitrary. Most of this came from having a high school coach who seemed to reinforce these beliefs based on what he said. But it was also in his experience as a runner. He was almost an Olympic Trials qualifier based on his half-marathon time, and he regularly paced and ran with us on some really fast workouts.

But at 28, he started having some back pain that pretty much sidelined his whole running career. I also followed competitive running pretty closely, and on the track, most of the best distance runners in the world were in their early to mid 20s. In the marathon, the best runners often were in their 20s or early 30s at the latest.

But I am not an Olympic level elite runner. I have been living in Baltimore since 2019. In this area, I know several fathers of multiple children in their early to mid 40s that are faster than me. They regularly run 25 to 30 miles and do ultramarathons. They push my idea of limits and boundaries. This area is absurd and unique in its overrepresentation of super-fast 40+ year old runners, two of whom have broken 2:30 in the marathon, but the idea and the breaking of self-limiting beliefs still stands. To a large extent, age is just a number. There are young, barely out of high school runners who always compliment these friends and fellow runners backhandedly on how fast they are for their age.

That means there are a variety of factors beyond my very narrow understanding of age. I will keep trying to run the miles of the age I turn at 40, but probably not beyond. There is a time when it will catch up to me, too. My 40–45 year old friends that only seem to be getting faster will, some day, be 50 and likely not be able to keep running personal records every year. A lot of these friends started running in their late 30s or some time around then, and they don’t have the wear and tear of someone who has been running long distance since they were 12 like me.

But for me? It’s realizing that everyone is different. It’s realizing I cannot predict the future, that so many outcomes are uncertain. And because of that, no matter how much I doubt or believe about future outcomes based on factors like my age, diminishing speed as I get older, more career and familial obligations. I certainly could peak when I’m 42, or I could peak when I’m 37. I could get injured this next year and never run again, but it isn’t about the outcome as much as it is putting in the effort and trying.

I use running as reference for the rest of life because it is usually a proxy for other life realizations. The first of these is living and experiencing delayed gratification. My progression as a runner has always been marked by long periods of plateau, followed by a huge, sudden jump in personal records and fitness. I ran my first marathon in 2:40:07 in college. It took me six years before I ran a huge personal best, and I shattered that time by four and a half minutes. I think it was realizing that consistent, long-term, often boring training of hammering 70 or 80 mile weeks over and over mattered, but it was also realizing that sometimes, we don’t see the fruits of our labor until much later. Right now, I have a lot of the fitness and gains from the 80 miles a week for a long period of time last year.

The other is restraint and balance. There are a lot of things in life where the more effort and time you put into something, the better you get. It’s a direct correlation. Running is not one of those things, but it is more of a bell curve. I might be able to maximize my potential as a marathoner by running 100–110 miles a week for 4 months. But after that, I will likely reach the point of diminishing returns and either get injured or burnt out from that kind of training. I use that volume of miles arbitrarily because I haven’t done that kind of mileage and think that would be the next level. And it’s always a balance to find the right formula, and that formula can always shift with different goals and different periods in life.

Again, the frustrating part is that most of the rest of life is not like running. More effort usually leads to more results as a direct correlation. Teaching was often also like that, and I’ve heard parenting is, too.

I do recognize that some of my running behavior might be a bit psycho, especially in terms of running the same loops over and over again, but I like to push arbitrary mental and conventional limits as process oriented goals that aren’t so fixated on the time I run. I have been averaging running 80 miles a week since last April, and I have been putting a limit on myself at that 80 miles a week. Some weeks, I hit it easily. Others, I hit somewhere close or have to stretch the week into a lot of double runs.

It is not running the times I want or hitting the process goals of mileage that count. It’s how it happens. Every run is unique. There are some where my body is pretty beat up and I struggle to run 10 minute mile pace. There are runs where I’m hitting 6:40 miles easily the entire run for over 20 miles. There are runs I run with others and the time flies by. There are times I am alone and need to keep myself occupied with my thoughts, somehow.

In the last five weeks, my area has been pummeled by snow and ice, so I’ve had to do quite a few treadmill runs. Some go by faster than others. I recall one treadmill run where I forgot my headphones and was in a crowd of people. All I had to listen to were people’s feet pounding the treadmill for 63 minutes. It went by extremely slowly and was mentally difficult to keep going and not quit, but I tried to still break up the run by five-minute increments to think about different things.

Although there are parts of me that feel better than ever, there are also parts that are getting old. I’m not going to be that guy who unequivocally says “I’m getting old” when I’m turning 29, and while my body and health still feel young, my habits are not. On Friday nights, at 21 and 22, I used to go to parties. Now, the vast majority of Friday nights, I’m at home with my wife, usually watching TV or a movie. On Saturday nights, I’m trying to go to bed early to prepare for a 20+ mile long run.

I’m at the age where it seems like half of my friends are building a running hobby, trying to get the most out of themselves physically while also prioritizing their health, so I try to impart some wisdom when asked. Even during weddings and days I do go to parties, I am usually home by 10 or 11 and never have energy for the after-party. I think the fact that hangovers are significantly worse at this age than 21 is a huge reason for that, as well as lifestyle preferences. Running and taking it as seriously as I do is certainly a huge driving factor in these better lifestyle decisions — needing to be up by 5 or 6 a.m. to run on any given day certainly does always limit the partying.

On a relational level, I used to try to be everyone’s friend and really agonize if that couldn’t happen when I was 21. Now, I have my friends, and I try to be friendly and kind to everyone I encounter, but I realize I have a lot of people who have been loyal and great friends for a long time, and that, unfortunately, sometimes there is only room for so many people in that circle. This does not mean I am completely closed to letting in more people I would call friends, but it just takes a lot more effort than it used to in terms of making plans and arrangements. Running is a big part of that — it is a very natural, organic way to spend two hours with someone in a shared struggle, talking about pretty personal things. Thus, I would say a good 40% of my friends are runners or have been runners in some capacity.

I am spending the next year uncertain about what the future holds. I used to project a lot more certainty over the future and what would happen in a month or a year, from who I believed would win an election to what I thought my grade on an exam would be. I still make predictions, but I have become a bit more uncertain and even superstitious about the future.

I think saying “X will definitely happen” gives some pretty bad vibes, and I realize I like to be surprised when my expectations are managed rather than disappointed when my expectations are too high. This has meant a lot of saying “Y will likely happen” or “Z might happen” to myself. I am running another marathon in three weeks and I might run 2:25, but I am likely to run somewhere from 2:30–2:34. On a bad day, I will likely run somewhere from the 2:37 to 2:41 range, but anything can happen, and I need to be prepared for the uncertainty and adapt rather than disappointed when things don’t go my way.

The same holds for what will happen in the next year or decade. When I was in college, I thought 29 was it. Get fast, or this would be my last chance trying. Move onto other parts of my life while I took my last shot at the glory of youth.

Now, it’s a little more nuanced. Running 29 miles at 29 was a way to feel young while getting older. I do think there is an element of youth gone when turning 30.

But is it my last chance? No, it’s a fresh start.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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