enjoy a beer.”
Sometimes you can even do both at the same time.
The ageless runner
iRun because I want to grow old gracefully Aimee Smith, Ontario
Imagine running a half-marathon on your fifty-seventh wedding anniversary. You’d probably be glad just to be running when you’ve been married for half a century, let alone put in 21.1k.
Now, pretend for a second that you only did the half because you’d already run three marathons in the last six months.
Now you’re starting to get a sense of the astonishing accomplishments of Betty Jean McHugh, the octogenarian marvel from North Vancouver, B.C.
McHugh doesn’t just defy aging, she’s declared it obsolete. She runs four times a week – usually at 5:45 a.m. Some of the women she runs with are half her age (of course, it’s not like she could find five other eighty-year-olds to run with). She does hills and speedwork and, when she’s not running, cycles for cross-training, practises yoga and hits the gym for strength training.
Along the way, she’s picked up more than a dozen Canadian and world records, including the fastest-ever marathons for women aged seventy-five and eighty.
Show me another grandmother who would say, as she was about to travel with her kids to Rome to run the marathon, “It will be such a lovely family outing.” Or who would decide, after running a marathon about once every two years, to start doing them more often because “I figured I was running out of years.”
But it wasn’t always this way. McHugh didn’t even start running until she was fifty-five. While her daughter, who went on to swim for Canada at the 1972 Olympics, was training at the pool, McHugh ran along the beach in her tennis shoes. She joined a fitness club, ran a 10k and then did her first marathon and finished in 3:32.
“I thought, ‘I’ll never do another one. I just have to get it out of my system.’”
But she, like so many other runners who have said the same thing, was hooked. She started doing destination marathons in places like London and Honolulu. She trained with a group of runners who spurred her on to keep racing. They talked her into running a marathon when she turned 75, and she set a world record.
In October 2008, running in Victoria, she chopped thirteen minutes off the record for eighty-year-old women. Then she ran Honolulu a couple of months later.
“She is something else,” says Heather Parker, who runs with McHugh. “My body’s not holding up as well as B.J.’s and I’m only sixty-two.”
Parker marvels at McHugh’s attitude and her approach not just to running, but to life. “She never complains. She’s bright and cheery and positive. She has a big breakfast every morning. She likes to read an hour a day. She makes everything from scratch.”
Yet in spite of her success and longevity, McHugh doesn’t even seem to realize what an inspiring story she’s become.
“I don’t actually think about it that much,” she says. “I don’t like all the hubbub about it.” So when race officials in Rome contacted her offering a free trip to Italy to run the marathon, she thought it was a joke and never replied.
“Someone wrote to me and said, ‘I want you to run the Rome Marathon, all expenses paid.’ I thought, ‘Who would want to do that?’ So I let it ride.”
Luckily, they were persistent. When she got there, organizers treated McHugh like an elite athlete.
“Rome was awesome,” she says. “In all my life, next to being born, I think it was the next best thing I’ve ever done.
“The best part of the whole thing was that I felt so privileged to be up front with all these Kenyans. They insisted I run as an elite runner. This is the icing on the cake of my career.”
And she’s not done yet. There are plans to run more marathons. It’s up to the group, McHugh says. Without them, she figures she wouldn’t still be racing.
“They are so good to me. I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for them.”
But there has to be something more to it than that. True to her humble form, McHugh says it’s just a bit of luck.
“It’s probably genetics,” she says. “I’ve been blessed with good health and good joints.”
Competing against yourself
iRun to run my own race Colleen Sheppard, Ontario
When you compete in a race, who are you really racing against? At the New York City Marathon, it’s thousands of other athletes. At smaller events, it might be fewer than 200.
But are you racing against those other runners or racing with them? For a handful of people who have a shot at winning, it really is a competitive race with real opponents. And I suppose if your archrival is in the same event and you want to be waiting for him at the finish line with a satisfied look on your face, you may believe it’s a true contest.
If you’re the typical runner, though, you are competing against only one person: yourself.
While to some people that might sound like a cliché you’d throw at your kid to teach him sportsmanship, it’s the prime motivation for most runners.
It’s not that they aren’t competitive, but most have shifted those instincts away from others and toward themselves.
Sure, you can look at someone who can do a 2:30 marathon and wish you could go that fast. But one thing that appeals to me about running is that far from being your opponents, the people around you are a source of inspiration and encouragement.
Whenever I’ve been training, I’ve met many athletes who are all working toward largely the same personal goal: to go farther or faster. I’ve met people who are trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon. I’ve heard stories about people who didn’t finish their first attempt at a marathon and are training hard to try again.
If you’re like most runners, the toughest and most worthy competitor you’ll ever face is yourself. And when you go farther or faster than you ever have before, that’s more satisfying than beating any other opponent.
That’s why so many runners talk regularly about their personal best times, or “PBs.” The PB reflects the peak of your own performance, and a standard you may still be trying to beat. Most athletes know their own by heart, down to the second.
In 2004, I finished a half-marathon in just over an hour and forty-four minutes. I was hoping to break 1:50, so I was pretty happy with that.
On training runs, I still picture myself breaking the tape at the finish line of an important long-distance race, to the shock of Kenyans far behind me, but I’ve accepted the fact that outside of my dreams, I may never even qualify for Boston. But if you test the limits of your abilities, you might find that although you’re in the middle or back of the pack, you may be faster than you thought. That’s what happened to me when I started training a little more intensely in 2006. I started running shorter distances at speeds that suggested I had the potential to do better times in my longer races.
Of course, all
