She has managed that with a regimen that gives new meaning to cross- training and will be music to the ears of runners who hate the labors of quarter and half-mile speed intervals. She says she hasn’t been on a track in two decades, fearing the turns will wreak havoc with an irritable “lower back and hip thing” that can aggravate the opposite knee and ankle if she compensates by altering her natural stride.
She was attacked 50 years ago for being a woman in the Boston Marathon. On Monday, she ran it again at 70.
Kathrine Switzer was a few miles into her history-making run at the Boston Marathon on April 19, 1967, when Jock Semple, the co-director of the famous 26-mile race, suddenly appeared behind her and tried to shove her out of the competition.
Semple’s lunge at Switzer was captured by national news photographers. What happened next changed running forever.
Switzer’s boyfriend, Thomas Miller, threw a block that knocked Semple out of her way, allowing the 20-year-old runner from Syracuse University to finish the race in 4:20:02 at a time when women were thought to be too fragile for long-distance running.
Semple later disqualified Switzer for, among other things, running with the men. She’d registered under the name “K.V. Switzer” not with the intention of becoming a women’s pioneer in the sport but to prove to her coach, Syracuse’s Arnie Briggs, that women could run 26.2 miles.
85-Year-Old Marathoner Is So Fast That Even Scientists Marvel
Even though Whitlock’s Prince Valiant hair has long grown white and thin, a photograph of him running in his early 20s shows a physique remarkably similar to his octogenarian build, Hepple said.
“It really is an astounding picture,” he said. “Normally a person of Ed’s age might lose a third to 40 percent of their muscle mass over that span. For him to have more or less the same mass as he had in his 20s, that’s really something.”
.. His marathon time at age 85, 3:56:34, is more than an hour slower than the 2:54:48 he ran in Toronto at age 73 in what is widely considered his greatest masters race.