What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [14]
The comment was pure jest. Margie Stoll, who runs about thirty miles a week, is not planning on going anywhere soon except to more races. Her current trainer, Sarah Fisher, met Margie while competing against her and began working with her in 2007. “I was initially struck by Margie’s composure and her unique quality of combining desire to win, pride in her achievements, knowledge of her abilities, and modesty. I have never met anyone quite like her. I have never heard her utter a bad word about anyone. But Margie’s impeccable manner hides a will of steel,” Fisher said. “She never, ever fails to do the very best she can on the day, in the conditions, against the competition. She is class personified.”
Recently, Fisher had been focusing on improving Margie’s form and giving her the kind of hands-on coaching she never had before. With small adjustments, Fisher, an acutely observant former banking executive with an MBA from Harvard, hoped to shave a few more seconds off Margie’s times. On the track, Fisher ran behind Margie, repeating reminders to her to start properly, to fall forward as she runs, and to look her way around the curves—that is, to look at least twenty-five yards ahead, so that her body turns under her head and forces the head to follow, naturally. Otherwise, the head, which is heavy, tilts, weights the body, and slows a runner down. She also reminded her to bring her elbows closer to her body as she kicks into higher gear for the final two hundred yards in her 800-meter runs. “She thinks, she accepts, she adapts, and then these little tweaks become habit—and she improves,” Fisher said.
To push Margie during her kicks, Fisher had brought along Nathan Hamilton, a twenty-six-year-old runner. Margie got a bit of a head start. (“It’s my birthday,” she said when Hamilton complained.) She otherwise conceded nothing. “Every time we came out of the turn into the last two hundred and I would start to catch her, you could just feel her kicking it up,” Hamilton said. “She is such a tough competitor.” When the running portion of the practice ended, Margie had enough energy left to lead everyone—laughing—in skipping, hopping, high-kneeing, and heel-to-butt kicking exercises up and down the field four times. Then, Nathan spontaneously offered to take her out for her birthday and dance her socks off. Margie looked a bit surprised, but when he grabbed her hand, she gamely did an impromptu swing dance with him on the field.
Despite the intensity of her training and weekend running schedule, Margie is no prima donna, according to Hans, who says he enjoys watching her go off to a race at 4 A.M. filled with good humor. “Then she’ll come home and cook breakfast for me and go work in the garden for the rest of the day,” he said. “She doesn’t just lie around on the couch for the rest of the day.”
There is little likelihood that Margie will ever again improve on any of her absolute personal bests, though it seems impossible to discount anything with her. “Now it’s just about not losing time. As you get older, you start to lose time. That’s the big problem. And that’s why it’s so important to do weights, not to lose muscle mass. Everybody, no matter how good you are, is going to get slower. The idea is not to get hurt and to slow down as little as possible. I’m just hoping that I’ll outlast everyone else.”
While running may not precisely be a Fountain of Youth, there is good evidence that regular running slows the effects of aging. A study from the Stanford University School of Medicine that tracked five hundred runners for twenty years found, as reported in 2008 in the Archives of Internal Medicine, that elderly runners had fewer disabilities, a longer span of active life, and are half as likely as non-runners