Yeah, I'm one of Those Guys.

I am a 50-year old runner.  Yeah, I'm one of "those guys."  The guy who still thinks he looks okay in half inch inseam running shorts and a singlet.  Still lines up at the front of a competitive 5k race, only to finish a half a mile behind the winners.

Our kids are grown and we don't play golf, so we run.  60, 70, 80 and sometimes 90 to 100 miles per week.  When people ask us how many miles we ran, we shrug it off with a nonchalant, "eh, only about 85 this week."

Our dresser drawers are full of race t-shirts, some of them much older than the guys who win the aforementioned 5k's.  We've got a couple of boxes in the closet full of bibs, medals and even awards for some age-group win in a small, local race.

During the day, we wear blue shirts, with navy ties and beige slacks.  But on the weekends we can be found wearing high vis yellow jackets, bright orange singlets and electric green shoes.

You will find us congregated  most Saturday or Sunday mornings, milling about the starting line of a race.  Maybe running warm-ups, doing strides, preparing for the race like our lives depend upon it.  We chat a little bit about how many miles we logged that week, about nagging injuries that will keep us from doing our best that day and usually way underestimate our finishing time that we share, then feign surprise at the finish when we were a minute faster than predicted.

We have all our PR's since turning 50 memorized down to the hundredth of a second, and we really like passing young runners in the final miles of a race, no seriously, it's really fun.

When we were 20, we most certainly would have laughed at this 50-year old version of ourselves, but who cares.  We are having fun and pushing ourselves beyond limits we couldn't have imagined.  We see the 70 and even 80-year old racers out there and we don't laugh.  There is nothing but respect.