Amazing story of a 60-year-old female runner

Kathy Martin (9) competing in the 3,000 meters in January at the Armory in Manhattan.

This is an amazing story of a 60-year-old female runner who is continually re-writing world records. New York Times catch up with her in a story posted here. The story was written by Barry Bearak. You can read the reprint below.

The crowd, small but noisy, fixed eyes on Kathy Martin, the woman in last place. Early on, she was fifth in a pack of 11 runners, calmly moving in heavy traffic. She ran not only efficiently but also beautifully, her classic strides in perfect rhythm, a fluid parting of the empty air, almost 

But the race was 3,000 meters long, nearly two miles — 15 laps on the indoor oval — and the other women, most in their 20s and 30s, were atop much younger legs.

A third of the way in, Martin began to fade, and though she continued her even stride, she was trailing toward the end, 25 yards behind anyone else.

Still, the crowd urged her on, and as she leaned into the final turn, people shifted their heads as if watching tennis, first looking at Martin, then back at the clock near the finish. The bright digital seconds seemed to flicker at hyperspeed, but with a strong kick, Martin completed the race in 11 minutes 16.5 seconds, a time 13 seconds faster than any 60-year-old woman had run before.

“Another world record for Kathy Martin!” the announcer cried out.

Life can bestow unexpected gifts, and sometime in her late 40s, Martin, a real estate agent living on Long Island, a busy working mother who had never been in a track meet, discovered a glorious secret hidden away in her body. Not only was she a good runner, she was also an outstanding one. In fact, she was one of the most remarkable female distance runners in the world.

This discovery of greatness in her legs came too late for the kind of dreams a younger woman might have: intercollegiate championships, Olympic glory, being the absolute fastest of the fast. As decades pass, maximum heart rate slows, aerobic capacity wanes, muscle mass tends to dwindle.

But Martin has been redefining what is possible for an older body, setting a string of formidable national and world records.

In competitions called masters races, athletes are reborn every five years, reclassified in age brackets like 40 to 44 or 45 to 49, each with its own set of top performances. Martin excels at every distance from 800 meters (about half a mile) to 50 kilometers (about 31 miles). While in her 50s, she broke American records in more than a dozen events.

“She is a star who runs under the radar of public consciousness,” said Ken Stone, the editor of Masterstrack.com, a blog that is the main source of news for the increasingly competitive masters circuit. “Some people put out a press release every time they step to the starting line, but Kathy is just a quiet lady who comes to an event, kicks everyone’s butt, towels herself off and goes home.”

Last September, Martin turned 60, entering prime time in the 60-to-64 age group, when she will almost certainly be faster than in a year or two or three. Setting records now is like eating a good meal while it is hot.

“I certainly don’t go crazy about setting records, but I like to challenge myself,” said Martin, a small dark-haired woman with a smile on her lips and hearing aids in her ears. “It’s you against the clock, you pushing the envelope.”

She lives in Northport, N.Y., in a house with Long Island Sound as a backyard, and sells property for Century 21, calling herself the Running Realtor on her business cards. Her Web site has a link to her one brush with celebrity status, a Nike commercial done a decade ago. Most of the ad shows only her behind with a voiceover that says, “See that, that’s 51 years old and can run a 5:08 mile.”

The center of Martin’s workday is a basement cubicle in a Century 21 office. She shuttles clients around in a white Lexus, and her conversations fill with talk of real estate: appraisals, inspections, termite reports, the sellers who are highly motivated and the others who are simply unrealistic.

But the early morning is all hers. Martin is outside by 7, launching into carefully conceived workouts, mixing long and short distances, covering flat surfaces and hills. Some days, she goes 12 miles, some days 5, running through the winding streets of Northport or along the trails and bluffs of Sunken Meadow State Park. She trains for speed on a high school track.

Chuck Gross, 68, a onetime runner now with bum knees, is her husband and her coach. He has the strong opinions; she has the strong legs.

“Chuck tells me what to do, and I do it,” Martin said. “I don’t want to read the running books and I don’t want to obsess about it.”

Theirs is a good partnership. Gross, a building contractor, delights in being the guiding hand in charge of his wife’s speedy feet. He is steward of the clock and the calendar, devising the daily workouts and setting the travel schedule. He signs up his wife for as many events as she can handle, maximizing her chances at titles and records.

Since her birthday, Martin has run in 13 highly competitive races, including the Chicago Marathon and a cross-country championship in Seattle. She has set nine American and two world records. Her pending record in the 3,000 meters was set in January at the Armory track in Upper Manhattan; a month later, competing at the same site, she broke the world indoor record in the 1,500 meters with a 5:12.2.

Last month, in a 50-kilometer race at Caumsett State Historic Park on Long Island, Martin not only set a national record, but her timed intervals at 20, 25 and 30 kilometers were records as well. Her 50-kilometer time of 3:58:37 was nearly an hour faster than the listed standard.

“Some of the American records are, shall we say, relatively soft, and she can poleax most of those,” Gross said. “The world marks are more difficult.”

Of course, 60 years old is not 30 years old, and it is tricky to rate the jaw-dropping feats of the young against the slower, if still astonishing, times of their older counterparts. Statisticians use an age-graded scale to compare performances using a percentage. Martin often scores in the high 90s.

Last November, in the Philadelphia half-marathon, she finished in 1:28:28, 44th out of 5,888 women. She easily won the 60-to-64 age bracket; only three of her peers were in the top 2,000. Her time was so fast she would have finished sixth among women 30 to 34. Her age grade was 99.3 percent.

This week, Martin is entered in the world masters championships in Jyvaskyla, Finland. It will be a chance to race against the European women who are her stiffest competition, and her final tuneup was supposed to be the national masters championships, which was two weeks ago at Indiana University in Bloomington.

She and Gross arrived two days early, checking into a hotel. They were anxious. Earlier in the week, Martin felt unusual discomfort around the back of her left knee. Acupuncture had helped, but she still had a troubling stiffness.

The morning was sunny on the meet’s first day. Martin went for a warm-up run outside the field house, circling the parking lot. There were tears in her eyes when she returned. The discomfort had escalated into pain.

More distressing yet, she said, “I felt something pop.”

The First Run

The running career of Kathy Martin began on an impulse. One night 30 years ago, Gross went for his usual jog after dinner and Martin, without giving it much thought, put on her sneakers and followed him out the door. The temperature was mild. The air was breezy. And Martin was pathetic.

Ten minutes into the trot, she lay down exhausted in the middle of Clark Drive in East Northport. “Get up or a car is going to hit you,” her husband said. And when she caught her breath, she answered, “I hope it does.”

The misery was ultimately redeeming. Martin, a 30-year-old nurse back then, assessed her cardiorespiratory future. On the plus side, she was trim, barely 100 pounds, and she did not smoke. But she was also woefully out of shape, one of those people always on her feet but never exercising. She wondered: If I cannot run a mile at 30, will I even be able to walk one at 60?

She resolved to get fit, each day running a bit farther, even if it was just the distance beyond another lamppost. Off she would go, step after step, sometimes celebrating the completion of her jog with a brownie or a hot fudge sundae.

Gross quickly assumed a supervisory role in Martin’s conditioning. After a few months, he got her into in a local three-mile road race. At first, she resisted. “I can’t run three miles,” she said. He brushed aside her objections, saying, “If you can run two, you can run three.”

Neither of them recalls how well she did in that first race, but the mere excitement of competing was addictive. Martin sensed she possessed untapped ability. She wanted to prove she could run even faster.

“I grew up on a farm in rural Ontario, and how would I ever have known I was a good athlete?” Martin said. “I went to a high school with less than 100 students. There was no money for girls’ sports.” When girls wanted to play hockey, she said, they had to borrow the boys’ sweaty gloves and pads.

No one in her family had been much of an athlete. Everyone smoked, and her three brothers were “couch potatoes like you wouldn’t believe,” she said.

But now Martin easily slipped into the world of running. Workouts were a ritual start to each day. Throughout her 30s, she won her share of local road races. It was a busy decade. She became a real estate agent, she became a mother. During the final months of pregnancy, she would walk instead of run, still logging her five miles. She resumed training six weeks after childbirth.

But it was not until she was in her late 40s that someone persuaded her to enter a track meet. She competed as a master in events like the mile and the 3,000 meters. She recalled: “I did a few events, and they said, ‘You know, you’re just a few seconds from the world record.’

“I said: ‘Really? There are records?’ ”

Overcoming Age

Distance running is more popular than ever. Running USA, a nonprofit organization that promotes the sport, counted 13 million finishers in road races in 2010, up from 5.2 million in 1991 and 500,000 in 1976. Much of the rise comes from aging baby boomers, building their stamina like a retirement nest egg. In 2010, 45 percent of all finishers were 40 or older; in 1991, the percentage was 35 percent, in 1976 only 28 percent.

Recent medical research shows that many of the ravages of aging are not so much inevitable as voluntary. Muscles do not have to shrivel, joints do not have to stiffen. Earlier expectations of physical deterioration were based on studies of sedentary people. But there is a marked difference in durability between the fat and the fit, the layers and the players. People who continue to exercise intensively have a much slower rate of decline.

“We’re not destined to go from lean flank steak to rump roast, not if we invest in chronic, high-level exercise four to five times a week,” said Dr. Vonda Wright, the director of the Performance and Research Initiative for Masters Athletics at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.

Martin usually works out seven days a week, not four or five. She runs and does plyometric exercises that emphasize strength and speed. She eats sensibly though not fanatically. She enjoys a good steak and an occasional glass of wine. She takes a multivitamin every day along with supplements of zinc, magnesium, calcium, vitamin D and omega-3.

Her face looks young for 60, and her legs have the muscle tone of an athlete half her age. Her body seems as finely tuned as a Formula One racecar. She routinely visits a chiropractor, a massage therapist, a strength coach and a physical therapist. She refers to these healers as Team Martin, and she believes they keep her aligned, stretched, kneaded, restored and stimulated.

One afternoon last month, Jon DiFlorio, the strength coach, had Martin doing deep knee bends as she held 88 pounds of weights in her hands.

“Most people her age are happy to focus on antiaging; they just want to keep playing golf or tennis into their 70s or 80s,” he said. “That’s not Kathy’s agenda. Kathy is an elite athlete. She’s focused on world records.”

Dr. Rick Statler, Martin’s chiropractor the past 25 years, said: “The key with Kathy is to keep her pelvis balanced. Like most runners, her tendency is to drift out of alignment. Running is hard. The body absorbs thousands upon thousands of impacts. It’s like a plane. It has to fly perfectly level.”

Several records eclipsed by Martin once belonged to another masters legend, Shirley Matson, now 71 and living in San Diego. She too did not begin until she was 30. She recalled: “My boyfriend was a runner. I asked him how you do it, and he told me, ‘Start walking, and when you feel like it, break into a jog.’ ”

Over the decades, Matson sustained repeated injuries, among them plantar fasciitis and sciatica. She eventually concluded her body had been out of alignment for years, setting off a chain reaction of woes along her right side.

She quit competing in 2005. “I had run 50,000 miles over 35 years and I decided that was it,” she said. “I hadn’t taken out the extended warranty.”

Masters Champions

Masters eligibility begins at 35 for track and field events and at 40 for distance running. Younger athletes may be more exciting, but the older ones may be more exceptional, triumphing against the years as well as the minutes and seconds. That would be them over there asking for masters candy, slang for Advil. White hair does not make them want to win any less.

In Bloomington, at the national indoor championships, 15 world records fell during the three-day meet, even with Martin sitting out. The oldest athlete to set a record was the rail-thin 92-year-old Ralph Maxwell, a retired North Dakota judge who bettered his own standard in the pentathlon. He said he came to track and field at 74, “reacting with shame and disgust at the flabby, flaccid body” he saw in the mirror.

In 2010, Maxwell was named the Master Male Athlete of the Year by USA Track and Field, the sport’s national governing body. There are not many competitors in their 80s and 90s, and each time Maxwell tried a new event, more success accrued. “I’d never hurdled until I was 88, and the first time I did it, I set a world record,” he said.

Men more commonly have a long history in sport. Bill Collins, 61, set a world mark of 7.58 seconds in the 60 meters in Bloomington. The record was especially noteworthy because he was staging a comeback after a nerve disorder rendered his legs temporarily useless last year. But Collins was a champion sprinter since high school and has been a top runner ever since.

The stories of many of the older women are much like Kathy Martin’s, their athletic ability coming as a revelation when they were in their 30s, 40s or 50s. Among the eye-popping performances in Bloomington was the 200 meters run by Kathy Bergen, 72, whose time, 31.86, eclipsed her own world record.

Bergen did not begin competing until she was 54. Her husband had decided to enter a masters meet, and she wondered if there was something she could try. She recalled, “I asked him what I could do, and he said running; everyone can run.”

This was an intriguing notion. She had memories of being fast as a girl. But she grew up in Brooklyn long before Title IX opened playing fields and gyms to women. The speed in her legs went untested and ignored.

“I would so love to know what I could have done as a kid,” she said after setting her record. “But back then, there weren’t any women doing the men’s stuff.”

Pain Management

Back in New York, the members of Team Martin anxiously flexed and poked and squeezed their star’s troublesome left leg. The world masters championships begin Tuesday. Would Martin heal in time?

The Running Realtor feared she had a torn meniscus, a rip in the cartilage that provides structure to the knee. But the consensus was that Martin was simply out of alignment. That 50-kilometer race March 4 probably was too much of a strain. Trained hands now needed to soothe her muscles and manipulate everything back into its proper place.

Within the next two weeks, Martin experimented with some slow running: first two miles, then five. She did quarter-mile intervals. She tried different shoes. She altered her stride. She ran with the family dog. Each day, the leg seemed to feel better. Eventually, she was pain free, and yet the knee still felt slightly unstable.

“I’m optimistic,” she said before boarding a plane for Finland. “If it turns out I can’t run, it’ll be disappointing, but I have to keep it in perspective. It’s not a heart attack. It’s not a diagnosis of anything terminal.”

She has years of running ahead of her and new age brackets to conquer. Older may necessarily mean slower, but it did not mean sluggish. That evening jog 30 years ago with her husband had changed her life, and now the vitality of running was an essential part of it.

“I hope I do this until the day I die,” she said. “I want to be all used up, just a wisp of dust left.”