The pace of life has slowed a bit since I retired and I've become more introspective. It has allowed me to give some thought to what I've learned in forty-some years of running, lessons that go beyond the obvious social engagement and fitness. I searched for lessons that are enduring and narrowed them to three.

The most profound lesson is a reinforcement of the axiom that your health is a gift and without it nothing else matters. It's easy to take your health for granted when you are able to get up each morning with the prospect of taking an hour run, enter a half-marathon on any given weekend, and train for the marathon season each year. However, with more than four decades of running behind me (and hopefully another four to go), age presents continuous reminders that health is fragile and should be handled with care.

This axiom becomes more apparent with age. Recovery in your fifties is not what it was in your twenties and thirties. Neither can you get away with the antics you could during your carousing years. Parties until three a.m. are no longer as recoverable as they were in early adulthood. Such subtle reminders pop up all the time.

The second lesson is the advantage of possessing a runner's mentality. You runners know what I'm talking about. We enjoy indisputable benefits such as good health, discipline, and perseverance, but I believe the acquisition of a runner's mentality trumps all. In fact, I submit that the benefits of running emanate from this mentality. It is a mentality that you don't wake up one morning and decide to adopt; it's earned after years and miles-thousands of miles-running in the heat, humidity, rain, snow, and other countless oppressive conditions.

Once you pay your dues, however, runner's mentality manifests as a panacea that is counterintuitive to non-runners. Feel a cold coming on? Go for a run to keep it at bay. Have a rough day at the office? Better go for a run to sort things out. But foremost, running keep stress under control and enables you to confront life's toughest challenges with relative calm and even clairvoyance. Reducing stress is the predominant benefit because stress kills. Countless studies cite running among the top forms of exercise for lowering stress by raising your heart rate and releasing endorphins. So persist and take refuge in a runner's mentality.

The final lesson, one that is increasingly relevant as the years slip by, is the importance of passing along the running tradition to others. Time has a way of sneaking up. Suddenly I find myself surrounded by a generation of health-conscious athletes. My daughter, a clinical exercise physiologist, signed us up for our first duathlon this year; I run and bike with my sons; my godson is winning awards in high school cross-country; and my grandson completed his first five-kilometre race (Okay, he had to be pushed in his stroller part of the way, but I'll cut him a break at one and a half years).

I am fortunate to still feel like a big kid at fifty-five; nonetheless, I garner a great deal of satisfaction knowing that the gift of running is being passed along to future generations. There is nothing more enduring than your legacy and nothing more joyful as the birthdays whiz by and you realize that your loved ones will reap the benefits from lessons it took a lifetime and thousands of miles to learn.

About the Author

Happiest outdoors, Jim Brennan plans to run his annual marathon and tregular circuit of mid-distance road and trail runs in southeast Pennsylvania in the coming year.