An article from geezerjock magazine

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Ultra Masters
By Sean Callahan


Why older runners are not simply finishing ultramarathons, they're winning them

When 70-year-old Sherman Hodges signed up for the 2005 Vermont 100 Mile Endurance Run he was told that if he showed up and finished the race he'd probably set the age-group record.

When Hodges, who lives in Skokie, Ill., finished the grueling race in 29:25:26 he found that he'd actually finished third in his age group. Ojars Stikis, 70, of Englewood, N.J. (29:18:57), and Aaron Goldman, 73, of Los Alamos, N.M. (29:20:00), had beaten him to the tape by less than seven minutes.

"It's hard to believe that the majority of people out here (doing ultramarathons) are around 40 or 45," said Tim Twietmeyer, 47, who is a five-time winner of the Western States 100. "It does surprise some people, but it's kind of cool. This is a sport you could do your whole life."

But older runners are doing more than just finishing ultra marathons and setting age-group records. Men and women in their 40s and 50s are among the elite in the sport. Here's a small sampling of accomplished Masters ultra marathoners:

At 43, Dean Karnazes is still winning ultramarathons. This fall Karnazes is running 50 marathons in 50 days in 50 states. Billed "The North Face Endurance 50," it's part of a promotion for North Face.

At the age of 41, Pam Reed won the Badwater Ultramarathon in 2002 and, just to prove it was no fluke, she won the punishing race again in 2003. This 135-miler starts on the floor of Death Valley in California at 280 feet below sea level, takes runners through searing heat in excess of 120 degrees and then ends with a climb to 8,360 feet. Reed holds the women's record in the race, 27:56:47.

Roy Pirrung, a grandfather of two from Sheboygan, Wis., is the dean of American ultramarathoners. In 2005, he placed second overall in the USA Track & Field 24-hour, running 141.66 miles and finishing about seven miles behind champion Steve Peters. Pirrung was 57 at the time.

Marshall Ulrich, 54, who lives in Loveland, Colo., is an ultramarathon legend. He won Badwater four times. He has moved onto mountaineering and has climbed the Seven Summits, the highest peak on each of the seven continents. He also has competed in all nine Eco-Challenge races.

Ulrich says older athletes excel at these races because of their intimacy with pain. "I think a lot of people have learned to suffer, basically," he said.

Brent Weigner, a 50-something geography teacher from Cheyenne, Wyo., agreed. As one who has run ultramarathons on every continent as well as the North Pole, he said, "You become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Being uncomfortable isn't a distraction. It's a given."

Ulrich also said that older runners often have the financial security to crisscross the globe in search of 100-mile races. "One of the reasons you see a lot of older people in the sport is that they're able to travel and afford to do it," he said.

Older runners, free of childcare responsibilities, may also have more time to put in the miles necessary to excel at ultra distances. For instance, Pirrung said that he runs between 90 and 120 weekly miles during peak training periods. "I think endurance comes from repetition," he explained. "I think the longer you do something, the better your endurance becomes. It's natural to be attracted to going further, because we can't get much faster."

Lisa Menniger, 41, from LaGrange, Ill., who is a professional duathlete and makes her living as a personal trainer and running coach, said that piling on the training miles over the years changes a runner's body. "You go through a physical transformation," she said. "The mitochondria that your body is able to build equip you for going longer distances."

Menninger also pointed out that ultrarunning is one sport where women may have a physical advantage over men. Physiologically, women have more fat stores, and ultramarathons are run at a pace where the body burns fat.

Ultrarunners on the other side of 40 may also possess more wisdom than their younger counterparts. "I think the No. 1 word is patience," Reed said. "The younger people go out and go like a bat out of hell. Sometimes that works, but in general it's not going to work, especially for long distances. You're going to leave it all out there too soon, and you're going to blow up."

"It takes a fair amount of time to figure it out," Twietmeyer said. "You can read all the books you want, but only by going 100 miles will you get better."

"A lot of runners as they become older, they're looking for new challenges," Weigner said. "They've learned a lot of tricks of the trade in dealing with nutrition and training and everything that goes with it."

Bernd Heinrich, a professor at the University of Vermont and an accomplished ultrarunner himself, argues that older athletes are good at ultrarunning because running long distances is something essential to being human -- no matter what your age. The first human beings were hunters on the savannahs of Africa who caught their prey not with speed but with endurance. As such, running long distances is quite literally a part of our DNA.

No matter what their age, ultrarunners as a group are often considered examples of the extremes of human endurance. Or just oddballs. For Heinrich, however, these people are doing what comes naturally. Heinrich won the 100-kilometer national championship in

1981 at the age of 41, running a 6:38:21, still a record for a 40-plus athlete.

Heinrich, a biologist, wrote "Why We Run: A Natural History." The book is a meditation on man's biological design as nature's ideal long-distance runner. Analyzing the endurance capabilities of creatures ranging from insects to migrating birds to camels, Heinrich shows how man, because of his ability to sweat among other evolutionary adaptations, became an endurance predator.

While lions and other predators hunt in the cool morning or evening, the earliest humans were relegated to hunting under the midday sun. Men were able to catch antelope and other game by sheer endurance. After a several-hour chase, man's prey, which were built for short bursts of speed to outrun equally fast predators, built up so much lactic acid that they could no longer run.

In his book Heinrich mentions a Native American legend of warriors chasing deer for hours and, after finally catching the spent creature, suffocating it with their hands. "Humans who capitalize on the deer's weakness by having a longer vision -- a view further into the future -- can be a superpredator through the agency of mind power," Heinrich writes.

For Heinrich, ultramarathons link modern man to the dawn of his kind. "When fifty thousand people line up to race a marathon, or two dozen high schoolers toe the line for a cross country race, they are enacting a symbolic communal hunt, to be the first at the kill, or at least to take part in it," Heinrich writes.

The biologist and writer still runs but has seen his speed ebb. His opinion is that older runners, although they can keep at this sport for years, hold no special grip on doing it well. Younger runners, he says, could use their speed to take over the sport if they so choose. With some exceptions -- for example, Scott Jurek, this year's 32-year-old repeat Badwater winner -- these younger runners are too busy going fast.

article originally published at: Ultra Masters