What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [8]
“In other words, I got myself into this, so it’s up to me to do it. More positively, I was saying to myself, Hey, this is what you’ve been wanting to do since you were a kid . . . a real track, a real official, a real race, and even a real gun start,” she said. “Running, unlike some sports, does not let you procrastinate. You have to follow the official’s instructions. You don’t have a choice when to start. When the gun goes off, it’s then or never.”
It was then.
Admittedly no sprinter, Margie ran hard from the start, but when she swept across the finish line she had no idea who in the bunch that crossed with her had won. A couple of minutes later, someone congratulated her on her victory.
She was trying to wrap her mind around that when she was called to the starting line for the 200-meter race. She finished first in it as well, and then in the 400-meter and the 800-meter races. Between each race, Margie sat by herself, in her own world. After the 800-meter race, a man came up to her and said, “You know, you’re pretty good.” When he discovered that she was a beginner, he offered her the name of a book on how to train. She was flattered and intrigued. But she did not have time to talk. She had the 1,500-meter race to run.
Margie took off at her own pace. Another athlete surged ahead. Margie remained composed and decided not to try to do more than she could. She settled into her stride. And then, lap by lap, she ate up ground between her and the lead runner. On the final lap, Margie, with energy to spare, kicked up the pace and easily overtook the lead runner, garnering her fifth gold medal of the day. After the meet, an impressed head official, a track coach at Middle Tennessee State University, encouraged Margie to take running seriously. “That’s when I said to myself, What is going on here? Am I really that good a runner?”
A few weeks later, Margie—an ardent Chicago White Sox baseball fan—invited some friends and family to Comiskey Park to celebrate her sixtieth birthday watching a Sox game in her native city. During the game, she announced that she was going to take up competitive running. Those who were present remember her glee over the fact that as the youngest runner in the 60-64 age group, she would have a competitive advantage.
Her new ambition came as a surprise, even to her husband and three children. After all, the prior extent of her running was jogging occasionally—often in her jeans—around her Nashville suburb of Green Hills. Beyond that it can only be said that she regularly read the track and road racing results published in the Tennessean.
“We used to jog together sometimes, and I thought that was all she wanted,” her husband, Hans Stoll, a professor of finance at the Owen School of Business at Vanderbilt University, told me. “I was delighted, but, to be honest, I didn’t think she was that good.” (He had not gone to the district finals. Margie would not have wanted him to. “This is my world,” she said, unequivocally.)
Five days after her sixtieth birthday, she ran her first distance road race, the Memorial Day 5K Dash at the City Cemetery in Nashville. “I figured that if I didn’t survive it, they could just dig a hole and throw me in it,” she told Jennine Renfro, a contributor to the Tennessee Running magazine. There was no need to worry. Her earlier victories were not flukes.
Running from the outfield warning track at Herschel Greer Stadium, Nashville’s minor league baseball field, up to Fort Negley, the site of the Union’s biggest Civil War fortress west of Washington, D.C., and down through a maze of paths through the city’s cemetery, Margie took first place for her age group. Her time was a respectable 26:41. She averaged 8:36 minutes per mile.
Three months later she cut that time by one minute and forty-three seconds in the state Senior Olympics. She not only took a gold medal in the 5,000-meter run, she also claimed gold in the 400-meter and the 1,500-meter