‘Ten-minute miles are the new eight’: the senior ultrarunners pushing the envelope
On a bone-cold morning in November, Wally Hesseltine, far from his cozy California home, was lying prone in southern Illinois – beside a trail of crushed gravel – his right knee bruised and bloodied. The initial 95 miles of the Tunnel Hill 100 footrace had unfolded with the swiftness of a fleeting breeze. Brisk, beautiful miles under a collage of crisp autumn foliage. The 80-year-old hadn’t fallen once. But the last five miles presented a particular problem. They were all downhill.
He couldn’t feel it, but he could see it – his upper body drooping like a glove without a hand – his hunched shadow sinking into itself until he finally dove into the soft grass. Little is known about “the leans”, a temporary but debilitating condition that can crop up in older ultrarunners. The phenomenon is oft observed but poorly understood. The same is true of Hesseltine.
Buoyed by the clamber of voices in the distance, the octogenarian picked himself up – dashed toward the finish line – tripped on the timing mat and went airborne. For a moment it was over, the love-hate battle with time. He was now the fastest 80-year-old to ever run 100 miles.
Columbian novelist, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, once wrote: “It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” Not only are more runners doing ultramarathons in their seventies and eighties, they’re also going faster.
In May, Jeff Hagen, 75, knocked an hour off the 50-mile record for his age group. But it wasn’t enough. Gene ‘the Ultra-Geezer’ Dykes, also 75, bested that by an hour – in the same race – smashing seven master’s records from 25 to 100 kilometers in a 12-hour period. And the record Hesseltine eclipsed in November? It was so new it had yet to be ratified. Four years ago, ‘Fast Eddy’ Rousseau set it at 32 hours. This spring David Blaylock brought it down to 29. Hesseltine got it to 26 and along the way beat 51 of the 179 finishers, most decades younger than him. Leaning back in his chair at his California law office, he jokes, “Ten-minute miles are the new eight.”
A myriad of suggestions exists to explain the growing presence of older athletes. A predominant theory over the last decade has been that we are merely unlocking abilities carried over from our ancestors. That as Homo sapiens evolved as a nomadic species, we hunted game over long distances, our advantage being our ability to sweat. The energy and speed of the young were beneficial in the last sprints for the kill, while the elders’ tracking knowledge proved essential in pacing the animal over longer periods and bringing up the rear with supplies.
Exeter professor and ultrarunner Dr Julian Jamison doesn’t see a correlation. “The hunter-gatherers weren’t living till 80,” he says and suggests a mix of patience, pacing, training and hereditary elements. However, he admits “the number of datapoints is still so small in ultrarunning. We simply don’t know.”
Many ultrarunners have long subscribed to the idea of putting “miles in the legs” while avoiding injury, and science tends to agree. Three papers in the last decade have shown the benefits of cumulative distance in older ultrarunners. They pace better, take better care of their bodies, and have less injuries than their younger counterparts at both marathon and ultra distances. By racking up more miles, our endurance base strengthens and makes us capable of much more than previously imagined.
Seven hundred ninety-six: that’s how many ultramarathons Rob Apple has run. But you’ll usually find him at the back, an example of the law of diminishing returns. “I remember when he was fast,” says Lazarus Lake, the mastermind of The Barkley Marathons, his voice warm like gravy. “I tell people, if you want to run well at 70, start late.”
Dr Hirofumi Tanaka agrees. Director of exercise physiology at the University of Texas, he was at the World Master Athletics Championships in March, in part to see Japanese sprinter Hiroo Tanaka. The retired teacher burst out of the gate in the 60-meter dash as if his lane was on a conveyor belt. Head down, arms and legs churning like pistons, he ran out of the camera frame of the other runners. His time? 10.95 seconds. The 92-year-old has held world records at 100 and 200 meters and didn’t start running until he was 60. Sister Madonna ‘the Iron Nun’ Buder, completed her first Ironman at 55, her last at 82. Hiromu Inada finished an Ironman at 87. He started at 70. Gene Dykes was 56 when he ran his first marathon. At 70, he logged a 2:54. Jennifer Russo started ultras at 50. This spring, at 57, the mother of three ran 300 miles in three days, a mark no American woman has reached at any age.
None of this surprises Tanaka. “Older people are getting closer to younger performances,” he says. “They are closing the gap.” He’s seen a dramatic shift in Spontaneous Walking Speed – professorspeak for the pace at which we do everyday tasks. Not long ago, 70 was the magic age when times would begin to decrease. Now, it’s over 75. His research has also shown the older the age, the greater the improvement we can expect to see with training. And that, he says, applies to and should encourage all of us. He attributes much of the phenomenon of elite masters to what he calls “a Formula 1 approach” – a pit crew of coaches, trainers, and various equipment for recovery.
But none of these theories explain Wally Hesseltine. He’s run 180 ultramarathons, broken his pelvis in a skiing accident, his nose in a fall, and tore a rotator cuff on the way to the bathroom. He also didn’t start late. When he began running on 8 June 1981, IBM was launching the first personal computer. Now, he runs with an iPhone so his wife can track him and pick him up.
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What he does have is what he calls “compulsive obsessiveness”. Five days a week, he’s at his law office, handling manslaughter cases and white-collar drug crime. After work, he runs three to 10 miles, showers in the office, and goes home for dinner. No TV. No social media. Instead, he reads. In 1990 he assigned himself a list of great books. “I was going to attack reading,” he says and devoted himself to at least 25 pages a day. Now, he’s read over 6,000 books. He did the same with music, memorizing CDs of the 1,000 greatest hits of classical, blues and country.
Dr Tanaka has observed similar personalities in other elite aging athletes: an optimistic, goal-oriented outlook on life, good relationships, positive attitude. They are often talkative, funny and, while serious about their running, they don’t take themselves seriously. And few are more quick-witted and humorous than Fast Eddy Rousseau. At some point in last year’s GOMU 48-hour race, he quipped, “I feel like I’m dying, but I’m afraid I won’t.” He finished 100 miles, stumbled back, nearly fell, grinned, and began making jokes. This June he lost his wife, had a stroke, underwent surgery to clear out a carotid artery, and was diagnosed with AFib. “All the things that happen to old runners happen to all old people in life,” says Lazarus Lake. “The ones that keep going just get more out of it.”
Despite setbacks that could have a normal 84-year-old in a nursing home, Rousseau plans to be at the USA Track and Field 100-mile road championship in February. Hesseltine hopes to be there as well. But each time, there’s a nervous feeling, a worry. Maybe this is the race when I show up and I’m the only one left in my age group.
One runner who won’t be there is master athletics champion David Carr. The Australian died in June at the age of 91. Just three months before, he was in Poland, in lane five, for a 400-meter race. Canadian Running called it “the comeback of the year (maybe century)”. In lane six was his biggest rival, Hiroo Tanaka. After the first loop of the 200-meter track, the Japanese runner was more than 30 meters ahead. No one, certainly not Carr, could’ve predicted Tanaka would reach a lactic wall. But when he did, Carr reacted as he had as a boy, instinctively. A runner in front of him had slowed. There was an opening. So, he called on whatever he had left and in the final stretch closed more than 20 meters of ground on Tanaka for the win. He then did what he was always taught in sports; he approached his competitors and shook their hands.
There’s something about seeing it, runners at ages we equate with our grandparents, that has us grasping for life hacks. And maybe, that’s where we miss the point. Maybe what they are showing us is how to be more in the moment. For Wally Hesseltine the moment is another chance to go long – deep - into the extreme where legs burn and lungs pray for air – into parts of himself that beg him to stop. And maybe that’s what we’re all so scared to death of. Stopping.