Can you teach an old car new tricks?

I know. You must think that that fool timelapserunner is getting so confused he can't even get his cliches straight. You might be right, but the mixed metaphor in this post's title is deliberate not accidental. I mean to cover two slightly different but connected topics in this post: a) how is an aging runner like a old car, and b) can an aging runner learn to do new things or at least old things in a new way? Why so reflective, you ask? Well, as you start to age you begin thinking about your activities a bit more, either before or after you do them. Heck, sometimes just trying to remember why you're headed down the hall can invoke a great deal of cerebral activity.


So ... timelapserunner Jr. and I were talking about car repairs the other day. Some of these can be quite expensive. Like all new shocks, struts and breaks. Comes to quite a tally at the end of the day. But stuff does wear out with use, parts on an old car must be replaced or at least reworked from time to time. Still, when you compare the price of even an expensive repair like the collection described above against that new car monthly payment, you quickly come to the decision that some repairs are simply worth doing to avoid incurring sixty months of hefty car notes.

The same truth holds for the aging runner. Sometimes you wear out stuff, or maybe you hit a curb and need a realignment. Or ... as the case was last week, you miss the shifting concrete of an uneven sidewalk and turn an ankle. When that happens to the aging runner, you don't even have the choice of throwing the old one away and opting for the new. You simply must see to repairing the old, by taking some time off, putting ice on the broken part, and generally resting. That's what the timelapserunner did last week. After turning his ankle on Wednesday morning, he rested Thursday, Saturday and Sunday. (For what that fool did on Friday, see last post.) The ankle's not perfect, but it's receding into background noise on the aches front.

But can an aging runner learn something new? For example, can he learn to watch his step? Can he learn to use the street (carefully) instead of the jack-raggedy sidewalks in his subdivision? Will he look into some other form of cross-training besides walking? Can he learn to live with his limitations and not get traumatized by plans that don't go perfectly. The jury is still out on all these, I'm guessing.