Raworth On The Run
I have lost count of the number of people who’ve told me they’re too old to run. Invariably, when I ask, they turn out to be younger than I am – in their mid-forties or early fifties. ‘You’re not too old,’ I reply. ‘It’s never too late to start.’ And I tell them about my running heroine, whom I first met in Richmond Park, London.
Jacquie Millet was 57 years old when she ran for the first time, prompted to get active after a cancer scare. She started with parkrun, as so many of us have, and was quickly hooked. Within a year, she was running marathons – her fastest is sub-3:45. Now, at the age of 71, this woman, who constantly astounds me, has more than 225 marathons under her belt.
‘How do you keep going, now you’re older?’ I ask her. ‘I’ve cut back a lot,’ she says, ‘I’m only running about eight marathons a year now.’ I laugh out loud and my jaw drops. A retired psychotherapist, she still knocks out about 30 miles a week, following orders from her online coach. Conscious of her age, he insists that she does strength work at home – simple stuff with bands, the stairs and her own weight. ‘It’s so boring,’ she says. ‘But I’ve started doing some of it, like calf raises, while I’m cooking.’
She’s still chalking up sub-4:00 marathons. Her only age-related complaint is that she gets more tired after a long training run or a big race. ‘I mean, I took a whole three weeks off after I ran Comrades Ultra in South Africa last year,’ she says. ‘That’s a 55-mile race!’ I exclaim. ‘You were 70. I’m not surprised.’
There’s no doubt that Jacquie is unusual. Off the scale, even. I started around the same time that she did, though in my early forties, somewhat younger. Yet, to date, I have just 20 marathons and a handful of ultras to my name – a small fraction of her haul. But, like Jacquie, once I started running I was surprised by how much I loved it and how much progress I could make des
