What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [11]
Margie counts her survival a matter of early detection, quick treatment, and good luck. She discounts all other possibilities, including divine intervention. “It was very small and we caught it early. I was lucky. I don’t like it when people refer to survivors as heroes, as if the other people, those who died, didn’t fight,” she said. “I just did what the doctors told me to do. I even ran during that.”
For two decades after her recovery, Margie lived a life mostly devoted to fostering her husband and her children’s successes, as Hans and her children each attested with unsolicited gratitude. They also uniformly noted that Margie had an irrepressible competitive streak. “She was always a tough-minded and competitive person, from the smallest thing,” said Andy, himself a former state tennis champion. “She was always organizing family competitions. Parents in other families might watch their children play, but we were a family that loved to play sports together—basketball in the driveway, tennis, soccer. She was always encouraging us to play pick-up games.”
Margie still organizes family activities around competitions. On a night I had dinner with the Stolls, we had to move from the patio of their handsome, three-story brick house to the family room in time to watch the 2009 finals of American Idol on a big-screen television. Margie was not interested in the performances, really. She favored the talented theatrical singer Adam Lambert, but she was betting objectively—and, as it turned out, correctly—in the family balloting that Americans would favor the good-looking underdog rock singer Kris Allen.
Less than a year after Margie set her first Tennessee record, Lunsford, a non-practicing physician who gave up medicine to concentrate on biking and running, died of a heart attack. He was fifty-three, the same age at which Margie’s father died. Margie keeps several of her first coach’s notes to her. “I love your style, grace, and tenacity,” he wrote in one. In another, he said, “I am having so much fun watching you being the best that you can be.”
His death was a blow to Margie. When she first returned to training at the Y, “I had to tell myself to stop looking for Bob,” she said. Still, she never faltered in her ambition. In 2004, she began working with Dave Milner, another Tennessee running coach, to plot the races Margie would undertake and to create a more elaborate workout schedule for her to use in her ceaseless, solitary training. Her times continued to improve and, almost casually, she ascended in the ranks of the nation’s elite runners.
More than one advanced male runner has fallen behind Margie’s efficient stride. Peter Pressman, the president of the Nashville Striders Running Club, met Margie not long after she began running competitively. For the first few years, Margie and Pressman, a veteran runner four years younger than her, regularly flip-flopped in finishes. “She’s a deceptive runner. There’s no waste of motion or energy in her stride. It almost looks as if she could continue at her pace forever. I enjoyed our little battles, but from the time I met her she made considerable progress. After a while I was just pleased to keep up with her. We both got older, but I got slower and Margie got faster.”
To understand how impressive Margie’s times have been, consider the results of a race—the Shelby Bottoms Boogie 15K in 2005—that, at sixty-four,