Margaret Webb - Older, Faster, Stronger: What Women Runners Can Teach Us All About Living Younger, Longer

Also by Margaret Webb

Apples to Oysters: A Food Lovers Tour of Canadian Farms

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Copyright 2014 by Margaret Webb

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ISBN: 978-1-62336-169-3 paperback

eISBN: 978-1-62336-170-9

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For those who showed me the way:

My mom,

my Ironman sister,

and the running sisterhood

A YEAR AGO, at age 50, I set out on a journey to run my way into a younger self. Just as Henry David Thoreau set off for the wilds of Walden Pond to enter a solitary relationship with nature and understand how to live well, I wanted to enter a deeper relationship with my body and understand how to train it well. I wanted to see if I could run faster and stronger after 50, but more than that, I wanted to enter the second act of my life in the best shape of my life, even fitter than I was as a 20-year-old varsity athlete.

Being somewhat more compulsive than contemplative, I threw myself into this project as I would a race. I immersed myself in studies, picked the brains of leading researchers, and cajoled a team of experts into helping me reach peak conditioning. I also sought out mentors, athletes who have found ways to run strong and long into their 70s, 80s, and even 90s but are quite likely the least studied on the planet: the pioneers of the womens running boom. I tried to apply all that I learned to my own training and then, as the finale to my super-fit year, I tested myself on the world stage by competing in the half-marathon at the World Masters Games in Turin, Italy, to see where I stood amongst some of the fittest 50-year-old women in the world.

I was not the same person at the start of that race as I was at the finish. When we run hard, we live fully in our bodies and often push ourselves beyond what we thought possible. We finish knowing more about ourselves and what we are capable ofin body, mind, spirit. And in fulfilling our potential in this world.

A race expands us.

In writing this book, I have been in a yearlong race with myself, and now I hardly recognize the runner or even the writer I was at the start. To borrow a line from Bob Dylan: Ah, but I was so much older then. Im younger than that now.

But let me take you back to the beginning of my super-fit year, when I was older, at least physiologically, and invite you to join me on this yearlong journey toward a younger, fitter self. It matters not whether you are a runner or do some other physical activity, whether you are older or younger, male or female. For it is my greatest hope that some of the lessons I have learned, the inspiration I have taken from the pioneers of the womens running boom, will help and inspire you to chart your own individual path to greater wellness. Because at the end of my super-fit year, having crossed over the threshold to age 51, I can tell you that the finish line opens to a glorious beginning: the possibility of an entire second act of life.

I CANT CLAIM that I awoke one morning in September 2013, halfway through my 50th year, suddenly charged up with the bright shiny goal of getting in the best shape of my life. My appetite for this challenge, for more fitness, for more life, has been building since I took up serious running.

I can remember that dayindeed, the exact moment I made that decision. My sister, Carol, planted that initial challenge in my head, and I can still feel, nearly a decade later, how it electrified and terrified me with about equal jolts.

She was 55 at the time, me a mere 42. With 13 years between us, we were not close growing up and had developed very different personalities and interests. Sports, for instance, werent exactly Carols thing, while I liked to think I was the athlete. We have two brothers, born between us, and at every opportunity, I teamed up with them to play hockey, football, and soccerand to tease our older sister about being a former beauty queen, having won third place in a local contest at age 18. She was the beauty, and I was the brawn, the jock, the tomboy. As a teenager, she was a good enough swimmer to be a lifeguard and complete a 2-mile endurance swim at a summer festival but, after that, her daily workout amounted to little more than a brisk walk with the dogs and some cross-country skiing or cycling on weekends. Then Carol had something of her own fitness awakening at age 50 and started going to the gym, determined, finally, to shed the weight she had gained during two pregnancies. A few years later, she saw an advertisement for a mini-triathlon encouraging people to try a triand gave it a try. She finished second in her age group and was hooked.

Later that year, over lunch just before Christmas, she asked me if I wanted to run a half-marathon with her.

My impulse was to say no. But how could I say no? My sister is 13 years older than I. And the beauty queen was honing in on my territory.

Yet the thought of running a half-marathonI didnt even know how far one was at the timeseemed inconceivable, overwhelming, impossible. To explain how it boggled my mind, Ill start with my feet. They are flatter than two planks. Back then, I could not even stand on them for longer than 10 minutes without arch supports. Moving up to my head, I had no confidence that I could accomplish such a feat of endurance, even though I had stayed fairly active as an adult, at various times sailing and playing ice hockey, softball, and golf. Since the invention of orthotics (or rather my discovery of them in my late 20s), I even did a little jogging a couple of times a week, for 15 or 20 minutes at a gait I called my old ladys shufflefittingly, through a local graveyard; I was terrified of lifting my knees too high, going too far, or running too fast for fear the pounding on my plank feet would ruin my knees and somehow cripple me for life.

There was every reason to worry, for in the scant 5 feet and 1 inch between the top of my head and the bottoms of my fallen arches, I weighed, at various times in my life, as much as 140 pounds, which is about 20 pounds heavier than female Olympic weight lifters of my height and a full 40 pounds heavier than the first female Olympic gold medalist in the marathon, the 5-foot-2 Joan Benoit Samuelson. Suffice it to say, mine was not a runners body. And horror of all horrors, I had developed a social smoking habit my sister didnt even know about (or perhaps she did), which was getting more social by the day. Oh, and I liked a drink now and again, preferably