You are still my hero!

by Ken Stone
(San Diego)

Your essay is priceless! It nails the dilemma felt by all athletes struggling to realize their potential amid memory of their former glory.

I've heard it said that masters track is 50 percent training and 50 percent injury management. So even at half-strength, you are incredible. I doubt I could break 7 for the mile right now! And you did it in a 10K. Incredible.

It's all relative. You're in the top .0001% of your age group. Be proud.

Great Expectations

by Joanna

It's nice to see that someone out there is tracking my performances:)

The McMillan calculator is limited because it does not take age and gender into account. Older runners lose less over longer distances than shorter ones.

The 2006 WMA tables list my 3K at 84.9, my 5K at 83.8 and my 10K at 82.9. As I noted in the article, these are all fine races for a woman of my age.

However, I was not so much trying to compare these races against one another, but against the races I ran in May.

By any reasonable measure, I ran significanty worse in June and July than I did in May.

So the point of the article was that my hopes had been raised by wonderful races earlier in the year, only to be dashed. Perhaps it was unreasonable to have such high expectations for the track season.

About equal performances

Interestingly, by at least one measure (McMillan calculator), the 43:00 10k is a slightly *better* performance than the 5k (equals a 20:42) or 3k (equals an 11:52).