Yesterday 5 x 200m on road; walk back recovery. Sunny day.

Medium-fast pace. Breathing/recovery good - no Covid.

Directly after 2nd rep a lady said to me (from 10feet away) "I've seen you here before, you run so fast! You're impressive, are you training for something?".

I replied that my training days were over; just doing it to keep fit.

After the 4the rep, a man walking past me (pushing his young son on a bike) said, "you're running fast!"

Whilst all this is nice, they say this because they have no concept of running..

..I am only one month fron 59, I no longer run fast, I wish I could!

At 50yrs I was ~20 in the world for my age with 12.1sec 100m, nowhere near what I believed I could run at that age. A torn hamstring at 46 put paid to fast acceleration; intermittent..

achilles flare-ups limited proper training. However, I expect the vast majority of older atheltes would have their own tales of woe, so even if I had been faster at 50, so wd they, meaning my rankings wd have been similar, everyone shifted up.

As you age the reduction in performance doesn't necessarily come from the general deterioration of the organism, but most often a specific injury or condition which limits your training or function - ok, it's circular in that your recovery and repair systems are better when..

you're younger. A ham tear at 19 is less likely to be chronic than one at 40 (but problems may arise later in life from an earlier injury which had 'seemingly' gone away). I estimated that a hamstring tear took 2/3 tenths of my 100m.

Achilles flare ups, reduced my ability to train hard. You can keep retain top performances up for a while as they are easier to maintain than to develop, but eventually they degrade if you don't work the tails, work to your limits.

No real athlete cares about the feedback....

..from a non-athlete whether it is negative *or* postive, they have no clue what they're looking at.

When I was younger, 'praise' from the uninformed was almost annoying; idiots, they don't know what is good or bad! Now, I'll take a compliment in good grace,

...as i'm no longer a competitive athlete. However, they still don't know what they're talking about.