What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [7]
MARGIE STOLL
The Natural
“I don’t know why running makes
me feel younger, it just does.”
Time is of the essence to Margie Stoll—not because she is running out of it, but because she runs against it. That’s why at 8 A.M. one perfect May morning three days before her sixty-eighth birthday, she was on a high school track in Nashville, Tennessee, eager to begin a grueling workout that would include a warm-up mile, then four progressively quickening quarter-mile laps, and finally a series of ever speedier 800-meter runs in which she would burst into high gear for the final 200 meters of each. Her short-cut tawny hair glinted with sunlight. Her blue eyes twinkled. And though some distance runners dread speed workouts, a radiant Margie could not wait to get at it.
As she began to run, even an unschooled observer could appreciate the remarkably relaxed fluency of Margie’s stride. Her upper body and thin, tan arms seemed light cargo for her long legs. Efficiency of movement took over, and age vanished. She no more wasted words than steps. “I’m afraid that I’m just not a very good storyteller,” she would tell me later. “I don’t know how to give expansive answers. It wouldn’t be me. That’s one reason I like running. I can be alone, and I don’t have to talk.” She prefers to let her times and records speak for her.
Here is a bit of what they say: in the eight years since she took up competitive running, Margie Stoll has racked up forty Tennessee single-age record times in track and road races, in distances from 100 meters to a half-marathon. She claimed two gold medals in the 2003 National Senior Games, four in the 2007 National Senior Games. In 2006, she was ranked the number one over-sixty-five runner in the United States in the 800-meter, 1,500-meter, and 5,000-meter distances, and as the number two runner in the 400-meter.
The following year, her top finishes earned her the honor—at sixty-seven—of being ranked among the nation’s top three over-sixty-five-year-old women runners by Running Times, the premier American running magazine. In 2008, she was awarded the Southeast Masters District Award for the best combined age-graded 5,000- and 10,000-meter times. Not bad for someone who ran her first official race on the eve of turning sixty.
“If people who think about senior runners like Margie Stoll have this idea of a little old lady shuffling down the road, they ought to come see her run and she can educate them in about five seconds,” Dallas Smith, a senior grandmaster and Tennessee ultra marathoner, said. “She’s one of the best senior distance runners in the world. She’s certainly dominant in this area. She has the heart of a great runner. When the gun fires and the race starts, she just pours her heart and muscles and bones into winning that race. Her effort and determination and willingness to fight are as fierce as any linebacker on the Tennessee Titans football team.”
Margie’s life as a competitive runner began one spring day in 2001 after a game of tennis. She noticed a sign-up sheet for the district trials of the National Senior Games. She was close enough to her sixtieth birthday to compete in the 60-64 age group. “So, I asked my doubles partner if she wanted to sign up for the doubles competition with me. She had other plans, so I signed up for singles myself. Then I noticed they had other events. I just signed up for all the track events: the one-hundred meter, the two hundred, four hundred, eight hundred and fifteen hundred. They were all on one morning, one after the other. I didn’t know any better. I just knew that I was turning sixty and I wanted to prove that I could still do something,” she said.
Margie knew no one at the district trials at Middle Tennessee University in Murfreesboro, and had no idea what to expect. When the official called the 100-meter runners, she went to the line. “I got into the crouch but had to ask if the toe could be on the line or needed to be behind it,” she recalled. As she waited for the start gun to fire, she asked herself what she