Is there an expiration date for PRs? I know for the officially sanctioned races like the Olympic Trials you can't just expect to jump in based on your PR you ran 7 years ago. But what about just general cocktail party conversation? What if someone asked me in a local running club or a bar what my PR is? I think it would be misleading to state a time I ran 11 years ago when I weighed 155 lbs and didn't get sore for 4 days after 5k road races. It would also be quite humiliating when you tell them your race plan to start off in 6:00 for the first mile.
I'm going to suggest 10 years to be the expiration date for a PR. That gives me a month to use my remaining PR to attempt to get a registration fee waived for a local road race. Who knows, maybe I would even get a single digit race # and my name announced as an "elite" runner . . .only to run 19 minutes with a furious kick to grab 8th place in the men's 30-34 age group.
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Interesting question. 10 years sounds about right or you could use other evaluation criteria such how profanely overweight you are at that given time. Meaning if you're 30 lbs overweight, you just can't use your college PRs anymore.
ReplyDeleteI still give people my PR's like I can run them at anytime - and when I run a 5k in 20:30 I just say, "Ah man I think I started way too fast and just died..."
ReplyDeleteI think it depends on your mindset. If you want to be honest, you can factor in expiration date, weight gain, blood alcohol level, number of children, etc.
ReplyDeleteIf you're more desperate to hold onto the past, you should refer to your PRs as things you could beat if only you had one more shot at it. Be mindful, this approach can be viewed as pathetic unless you're surrounded by a group of former single A high school football players in a dive bar back in Wytheville, VA.
I think that PRs should last forever and we should talk about them more as we get older. That way, we can really sound pathetic. In 10 years, I want to sound like Uncle Ricco on Napoleon Dynamite - "You think I can throw this football over that mountain?". Man, if coach would have put me in, we could have won the VMI Invitational!
ReplyDeleteI hate to break this news to you, but Uncle Rico was probably about your age in Napoleon Dynamite. So you don't have to wait 10 years to sound so pathetic.
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