What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [15]
To celebrate her seventieth birthday and a decade of competitive running, Margie is planning to run in the Boston Marathon in 2012, so that she will be able to take advantage of being among the youngest runners in the seventy-to-seventy-five age bracket.” She is also aiming to win her way back among the top three women runners in her age group, as ranked by Running Times and to continue to earn standing as an elite runner. (That designation is given to runners who rank above the ninetieth percentile in an age group, as compared to the performances of those in different age groups.) She faced her first major hurdle in accomplishing that goal in when she raced in the 1,500-meter race in August at the 2009 National Senior Games, where she was one of 10,000 athletes competing at Stanford University in Palo Alto.
As she warmed up on the track and tried to focus on her goal pace, she found herself hopelessly distracted, wondering when Marie-Louise Michelsohn would appear on the track and eclipse her dream of the gold. When she went to the stand to wait for her race to be called, she asked Hans, “Have you seen Marie-Louise?” He had not. No sooner had he shook his head than an announcer called Marie-Louise to the check-in table. Margie speculated that her nemesis had not yet initialed her name on the sign-in sheet. When her age group was finally called to the starting corral, Margie continued to scan the faces of eighteen other runners for a Marie-Louise. Then, suddenly, a race official arrived to give last-minute instructions and she heard her name announced, but not that of Marie-Louise. She was a no-show.
But now Margie had only time to stretch her arms and take a couple of deep breaths before the starting gun sounded. She was lined up third from the inside of the track and needed to get by just two runners to get to the inside lane. “That was accomplished pretty easily, so I didn’t have to worry about trying to pass on the first curve,” Margie wrote in her own post-race recap. “Approaching the stadium side of the track, I heard the announcement, ‘In first place is Margie Stoll from Tennessee.’ Nothing could have sounded sweeter. I just needed to hear that sentence three more times. I would not let myself slow down. If somebody caught up to me, kudos to her, but I would not help her by slowing down.” She was ahead of pace at 300 meters, then at 400 meters. She began hearing her coach’s voice in her head: “Light feet, focal points, and relaxed shoulders . . .” She mentally checked to make sure of each. And as she did, she heard a group of male voices chanting, “Go Tennessee!” Not that she needed it, but the cheer gave her a shot of adrenaline. Soon enough, she heard it again and then, loudly, one last time before she heard the announcer bellow, “Crossing the finish line in first place is Margie Stoll.” She glanced up at the scoreboard and saw her name at the top with a time of 6:33:84. “It was official. I had lived my fantasy,” Margie said. Over the next few days, she also took gold in the 800-meter finals, with a time of 3:13:47, as well as two silver medals, in the 5K and the 10K, behind the road racer ranked #1 by Running Times.
Her competitive streak is hardly quenched. Margie is now nursing a whimsical hope that her high school class will stage a one-mile race when it holds its fiftieth reunion in Chicago. She already counts winning a virtual race in 2008 against the men of her class’s cross