Going Strong: Older Adults Swell the Ranks of Endurance Athletes

Margaret Hagerty, 85, competes in the Stanly County Family YMCA Strong Communities 8K road race on August 2, 2008 in Albemarle, North Carolina. Hagerty holds a record in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest woman in the world to have run a 26.2-mile marathon on all seven continents. Photo by Kat Keene Hogue

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Margaret Hagerty, Sister Madonna Buder, David Jones. Although you won’t see them in Beijing competing in the Summer Olympics, they have made it into the record books of endurance sports, with performances that would have left many younger athletes crumpled on the racecourse.

Hagerty, 85, of Concord, N.C., is in the Guinness World Records as the oldest woman to have run a 26.2-mile marathon on all seven continents.

Buder, 77, a nun in Spokane, Wash., in 2005 became the first woman over 75 to complete an Ironman Triathlon, an event consisting of a 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bike ride and a marathon run, done successively.

Jones, 61, of Canoga Park, Calif., this year became the oldest solo finisher in the Race Across America, a grueling 3,000-mile bike ride.

As such, they are the crest of a tidal wave of older adults who compete in taxing endurance events that, not long ago, would have been unthinkable for people in their 50s and beyond. “Evidence suggests that 50-and-over athletes are one of the fastest-growing segments in endurance sports such as running, cycling, triathlon … and are likely to continue growing fast, as boomers enter their ranks,” says Hank Williford, head of the department of physical education/exercise science at Auburn-Montgomery University in Alabama.

Hagerty, Buder and Jones are proof that the old boundaries of endurance sport are a thing of the past. But their journeys—like those of their cohorts—started with single steps.

Hagerty’s journey began in 1987, when she attended a stop-smoking clinic at age 64. The medical professionals leading the clinic were specific in their advice: “They told me I had to move it,” she says. “Exercise, they said, would help me.”

Determined to quit her half-pack-a-day habit, Hagerty jogged out the door the next morning, and made it past four houses down the street. “I said, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to try and make it five houses.’ ”

Within a year, she had run her first marathon; a decade later, she crossed the finish line of the 2000 Millennium Marathon in Hamilton, New Zealand, to become the 17th woman—and the oldest at age 76—to run a 26.2-mile race on all seven continents. The retired bookkeeper, who is also a volunteer AARP tax adviser, continues her running and globetrotting ways: Last May, she ran a 6.2-mile race on the Great Wall of China.

Buder, a nun with the Sisters for Christian Community, started running when she heard a priest expound on its benefits. “He made it sound like running was a panacea for everything,” Buder recalls. “I said, ‘I thought that’s what prayer was supposed to do!’ ” Still, she was intrigued enough to start, and was soon entering races.

In the early 1980s, Buder heard about the emerging swim-bike-run sport of triathlon. “I told myself, ‘I know I can run.’ I used to ride bikes as a kid, and I swim on vacations.” She has completed more than 30 Ironman distance triathlons, the last one in Canada in 2007. Buder believes that distance and devotion go together well. “When you’re out there alone on the roads, you know whose hands you’re in,” she says.

Jones, an aerospace engineer, began long-distance biking in 2001 after injuries sidelined his running. In 2006, he bought a minivan, rented an RV and recruited a support team of five friends and family members in an attempt to complete the Race Across America. He made it from California to Kansas, about 1,300 miles, before high winds and a sore backside forced him out.

He tried again in 2007. “There were periods every day when I felt terrific,” Jones says. “There were also periods when I wondered if I would be able to go on.” He did go on, completing the 3,043 miles from Oceanside, Calif., to Atlantic City, N.J., in 12 days, 1 hour and 15 minutes—good for 15th place out of 30 starters. In June, he broke his own record, completing the course from Oceanside, Calif., to Annapolis, Md., in 11 days, 3 hours and 25 minutes.

Older endurance competitors like Jones are indeed making their mark. Running USA, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based not-for-profit organization that tracks trends in distance running, found that the number of race finishers age 55 and over has grown from 336,000 in 1992 to 792,000 in 2007—a 136 percent increase. Even at a high-profile endurance event like the Boston Marathon, finishers age 60 and older have soared from just 65 participants in 1988 to 1,063 in 2008.

What does this tell us? “Age isn’t the limiting factor people think it is, especially in endurance,” says exercise scientist Williford. “We’ve tested 70- and 80-year-old athletes who have cardiovascular fitness levels similar to an average college student.”

The old attitude had more to do with society than with physiology. “Older adults always had this capacity,” says Williford, who is also a competitive triathlete at age 61. “They just weren’t trained or encouraged to exercise it.”

John Hanc, who frequently writes about fitness for the Bulletin, lives in Farmingdale, N.Y.