Orville Rogers’ 5 Rules for Running Forever

1. As far as training goes, listen to your body. Don’t go too fast or too far.
2. When you’re upping your training, increase your speed or distance, not both. If you overtrain, you risk your next competition.
3. Look at the records and then make a goal for yourself that you think you can do.
4. Visualize, and when you visualize, picture yourself breaking those records.
5. Never give up.

Oh yeah—and stretch.

at age 95, he has set 7 world age group records this year

Read the complete article here.

I agree with his advice especially #1 & #2 (except that I forget to stretch).

1.   It is really important when injured to know when to run, how fast, how far and how often. That means listening to your body and knowing when aches & pains are serious or just part of life.  It means being patient… (I am not good at this!!)

2.  I usually concentrate on distance.  Being older, I need to build up my stamina and fitness level.  I need to be careful about overdoing.  I used to worry about speed when I only ran 5ks.  I also did more speed workouts when I was injury-free.   Now I seem to always be coming back and I am glad to be running.

2011 stats from http://www.runningusa.org

3.  My goals in the past have been PR or win a Age Group award.  Again when you are constantly in recovery mode, PRing is NOT realistic. So a realistic goal may be to be ABOVE AVERAGE.  It seems that I am way above average with regards to “AGE” and I am usually above average in my 5K time.  So my new goal is to be above average in my 10k and half marathon times.

and I NEVER GIVE UP!!!!

Happy Running! Do you have any other running advice? Are you “Above Average?”