Running for their lives
Pioneer Valley Women’s Running Club members Nicole Brackman, second from left, Linda Edwards, fourth from left, and Donna Shea, far right, pose following a race. Photo courtesy of Nicole Brackman
Midlife striders share pluses of hitting the pavement
By Debbie Gardner
debbieg@thereminder.com
They’re out in all kinds of weather, tattooing a steady beat as they move along the sides of the roadway. Sometimes you see them alone. More often, you see them in groups, their multicolored running gear reminiscent of a bouquet of flowers – or perhaps a flock of tropical birds.
There’s no denying American women have taken to running in a big way. In 2013 Running USA reported that more than 10.8 million women crossed the finish line of organized road races – from 5Ks to half marathons to marathons and specialty races – a 57 percent increase since 1990 (
www.runningusa.org/statistics).
To say women runners have come a long way from the Boston Marathon of 1967 – when Katherine Switzer registered for the then male-only race using just her initials and finished the 26 miles in 4 hours 20 minutes despite having to fight off a race official who tried to pull her off the course – is an understatement.
In the past four decades tens of millions of women have laced up their running shoes and hit the pavement. Some rediscovered a passion from their youth. Others had never been runners – or athletes at all until perhaps middle age.
That is one of the sport’s biggest surprises – the growing popularity of running among women over the age of 40.
Canadian author and sometimes runner Margaret Webb is an example of this trend. In 2013, a then-50-year old Webb spent a year attempting to reach her peak physical running condition to compete in the half marathon at the world Masters Games in Turin, Italy. She chronicled her efforts – and discoveries of how running can indeed become a fountain of youth for middle-agers –in her book “Older Faster Stronger” (see page 14 for more about Webb and her book).
Webb wasn’t the first woman to discover the power of running. Several members of the Pioneer Valley Women’s Running Club (PVWRC) have been embracing the midlife benefits of pounding the pavement for years. PRIME spoke to four about why they run. Here are their stories:
Virginia Brown – training for her second Boston Marathon
I met Virginia “Ginny” Brown at Starbucks on a cold Sunday morning in early March, just after she’d completed her run for the day. It was 9:30 a.m., and the Westfield, Massachusetts native had been pounding the pavement in Longmeadow with a group from the PVWRC since 7:30 a.m.
“I like to have my coffee,” the petite 61-year old athlete confessed. “So I get up at 5:30 a.m., and meet them at 7:30.”
A lifelong fitness enthusiast who’s been working out since her children were born “a long time ago,” Brown said she was actually fairly new to running, having discovered the sport only seven years ago.
“That was just meeting friends (from work) and going out running,” Brown, who has been an ICU nurse at Baystate Medical Center for the past 30 years said. “We did six miles and it felt fine.”
In fact, it felt better than some of the other sports she had been doing, such as biking and hiking. Brown was hooked. Then 53, she joined the Empire Running Group, which hosts timed races, and later discovered the PVWRC and Women in Motion Running Group.
She ran her first marathon in 2013, crossing the finish line in Burlington, Vermont on May 26, her 60th birthday. She credits members of the PRWRC with teaching her how to fuel and hydrate her body properly for the sport and especially, the two younger runners who helped her train for her first half-marathon in Hartford, Connecticut, for convincing her she could go the 26-mile distance.
“I guess it’s a sense of accomplishment, especially when you have a milestone birthday like that, turning 60, you want to do something. That was my goal for 60, and then I just kept running, ” Brown said.
Running, she noted, is a sport that’s good for both the body, and the mind.
“Runners don’t need psychologists and psychiatrists. They work it out on the run,” Brown said. “[And] I don’t feel any different physically than I did in my 30s, I really don’t.”
Recently Brown began supplement her running workouts with time doing Cross Fit – an intensive exercise routine she discovered about three years ago at her gym.
“It uses heavier weights, which is good for my bones at this age,” she said.
And despite the popular notion that athletes start slowing down as they age, she’s planning to keep running until she’s in her 80s.
“That’s the one thing – you don’t have to slow down until you are 80. There are women in my age group – 60 to 64 – who are really fast,” Brown said.
“Staying active is just part of life, and is should continue,” she added.
In fact, Brown’s hoping to shave a little time of her second stab at the Boston Marathon this April 20.
“Last year I did it in four hours, eight minutes, 59 seconds. I want to do just a little better and just to get across the finish line,” Brown said. She’s also applied, and been accepted, to run the New York Marathon later this fall.
For now she’s logging the training miles – two solo or small group runs on her days off during the week, two longer runs with the support and encouragement of PVWRC members on the weekends totally about 30 miles, plus Cross Fit workouts three days a week. Her longest single day run – 22 miles – was slated for March 28, then she said she’d start cutting back until the marathon.
Despite her earlier success, Brown stressed that running with a supportive group like the women from the PVWRC has made all the difference when it came to setting the bar to run Boston again this year.
“The encouragement, the [help with] training … the fact that they would get up with you on a 20-degree below zero day and run with you because you have to … you can’t find that kind of support, especially among women,” Brown said
Donna Shea – Hartford Triple Challenge and 3 triathlons
Donna Shea loves the challenge of a triathlon. She’s done 13 since taking on her first running-biking-swimming competition the year she turned 50.
“It’s an incredible cross-training opportunity. I can’t believe how much I love it. I never was a swimmer early on,” said the 55-year-old Shea, who was fresh from a weekend competing in an indoor triathlon when we spoke in early March.
A runner in her early 20s, Shea said she rediscovered the sport in her 40s, just as she was finishing up graduate school.
“I thought, I’ve got to get out and do something,” Shea said. Her first mid-life race came the year she was turning 50, when she asked her brothers to do Philadelphia’s 10-mile Broad Street Run with her. That same year, she also trained for her first triathlon, convincing her younger brother to compete with her on her birthday.
According to Shea, when you compete in a triathlon “They write your age on the back of your leg. At the beginning they wrote ’49,’ and at the end my little brother wrote ‘50, no sweat’,” she said.
About five years ago she joined the PVWRC, and now mentors at the club’s annual walk-to-run clinics.
“I got bored [training] by myself and found the running club through research,” Shea said. “This group of women, they have become my dearest friends.”
Two members of the club are training with her to compete in this year’s Hartford Triple Challenge, which consists of three half-marathons– one in April, one in May and one in October. At the completion of the fall run, Shea said they would all be awarded special jackets.
The Director of the Technology Transfer Center at the University of Connecticut, Shea said her nine-to-10 hour workdays sometimes make training for races or triathlons tricky.
“To tell you, when I get up at 4:30 in the morning [to train], I wouldn’t do it alone, but I look forward to running with friends,” she said. “We’re running along and sharing a recipe at 5:30 a.m.”
Running, she said, has both given her confidence and improved her health.
“I don’t feel like I’m aging,” Shea said. “I went to have my annual physical [and] I’m right in the middle of menopause and my doctor asked, ‘How’s it going?’ and I said, ‘I’m not even noticing it, I’m breezing through it.’ I think it’s the combination of all three trainings.
“My blood pressure is incredible and every time I go in [my doctor] says that. My bad cholesterol has come down – my LDL – which in my family is genetic,” Shea continued. “It used to seem nothing was helping, but now the running and my healthy eating, that may be the difference.”
Shea said her typical training schedule is three days a week of running, usually four to six miles for maintenance, eight to 10 miles per session as she’s getting close to a triathlon. She also does five to six miles on her bike at least once a week (indoors watching T.V. at this time of the year), and laps in the pool at least once a week. She also recently added a day of strength training to her schedule.
“Running is the thing I do all year ‘round,” Shea said. “We’re pretty much out there unless it’s crazy ice.”
Her husband, a high school counselor who teacher karate and tai chi, is “very supportive” of her training, Shea said. “He just sees me happier than I’ve ever been and he loves it.”
Her goal for this year’s triathlons is to improve her open-water swimming – “Little goals are helpful with consistent training,” she noted, and she encourages anyone interested in giving a triathlon a try to check out the indoor events.
“The JCC (Springfield Jewish community Center) in Springfield has one every year,” Shea noted. “It’s a great exercise [and] you learn about transitioning.”
Linda Edwards – Olympic distance triathlon
Linda Edwards was in the middle of her workday as director of marketing at Glenmeadow Retirement Community when we met to talk about running.
“I was not raised as an active person, but as I got into my 40s, my body shape started to change,” Edwards, who is now president of the PVWRC, said. “Right about that time the running club was having one of their [walk to run] clinics and I got into running.
“Like most runners, I started increasing my distance [and] I did a half marathon,” she said.
However, Edwards began to find that straight running was hard on her body. Just as she was turning 50, Donna Shea approached her and said “You’re turning 50, you need to do a triathlon, and I’ll do it with you.”
The two trained all summer and competed in the women’s-only sprint distance triathlon in Farmington, Connecticut.
“It just somehow seemed that the combination, for me, it’s good for you physically because you’re not just doing one thing,” Edwards said of training for a triathlon. “It keeps me interested, and it’s fun.”
The day we met, Edwards had hit the pool at the JCC in Springfield at 5:30 a.m. to do laps.
“No matter what sport you do, they always tell you you should cross train [because] it makes you stronger,” Edwards said. ”Swimming, biking, running – if you cross train you do it in a more balanced way, and I do want to be doing this when I’m 70.”
The typical sprint triathlon – which includes a 2 ½-mile swim, a 10 to 15-mile bike ride and a 5K (3.1 mile) run – “those distances are really, really manageable when you start training for them,” Edwards said.
This summer she’s tackling an Olympic-distance triathlon – a four-mile swim, a 20 to 25-mile bike ride and a 10K (6.2 mile) run.
“Last summer an Olympic distance seemed too far but now I’m ready. I’ve been training all winter,” Edwards said.
Like most athletes, she said some days training is easy, other days it’s not so much fun. That’s where the support of a group like the PVWRC comes in.
“These women are great. Someone will hear about a race, and [someone] will say. ‘I’m going to do it’ and one by one we all say, ‘that sound’s good,” she said. ‘The friendships I’ve made by being active … people I would have never met because they live in different areas.”
In preparation for this summer’s triathlon, Edwards said she’s “trying to swim two times a week, I run three to four times a week, and during the winter I bike indoors – either I take a spin class or inside on my [bike] trainer.”
As the event gets close, Edwards said her calendar is her friend. “Life has always been chaotic with family and work. I have to make it fit, I don’t have unscheduled time.”
Nicole Brackman – Disney’s Goofy Challenge
Nicole Brackman and I had the most trouble connecting to talk about running. We’re both working mothers – she teaches history at the Hebrew High School of New England in Hartford, Connecticut – and finding a time when neither of us was running to a school or after-school meeting or appointment was a challenge.
It made me more impressed with her commitment to running, and the two-day Goofy Challenge road race series she’d recently completed.
The Goofy Challenge, Brackman explained, consists of a half-marathon, or 13.3-mile run one day, followed by a full 26-mile marathon the next day.
“You run 39.3 miles in two days,” Brackman said of the January event. “I had a great time. It was a real confidence builder.”
Like triathlete Donna Shea, the 45-year-old Brackman is not new to running, having taken up the sport in college, where she competed in her first marathon. But she had shelved her running shoes for a time to start her career and family. The birth of her second child spurred her to lace up again. A relocation turned exercise into solace.
“When he was three we moved to Florida from New York,” she said. “I didn’t have any friends [where we moved] and I was lonely. I ran to stave off the loneliness.”
She kept up the running when the family moved to Western Massachusetts in 2011, joining the PVWRC for support and camaraderie – “I’m very fortunate, these women are my closest friends “ – much has she had sought out and joined a running club while living in Florida.
Now, Brackman said running is something that she does for herself.
“I just need the outlet,” she admitted. ‘I don’t know, but being in my 40s, I feel more settled in my adult self [and] I just find [running] very therapeutic and empowering in a way I didn’t feel earlier.”
Brackman said she logs between 20 and 30 miles of running each week, leaving the house at a quarter to 5 on weekday morning so she can be home by 6 a.m. She’s also recently become interested in triathlons, competing in her first event this past summer. She’s added triathlon event training to her regular weekly schedule.
“I do one day of swimming and I try to get in a bike day or a [weight]lift day; an extra day of something each week,” she said. A “very supportive” husband, living close to the JCC’s fitness facilities and an eldest child who is of an age to watch over things for a short time while she fits in some training help Brackman keep up her schedule.
“It’s a challenge, [but] I’m not fit to be around if I don’t get something in every day,” Brackman said. “I work very hard at my job and with my kids and I get it done somehow.
“All the laundry doesn’t always get done the way I want it, and we don’t have gourmet meals every night, but it gets done and everyone has what they need,” she added.
The Goofy Challenge behind her for this year, Brackman said she’s set her sights on a half-marathon in April, a 10K race in May, and possibly, “a couple of triathlons” this summer. She’s also thinking about signing up to do Goofy again in 2016.
Everyone has a ‘why.’ but …
Edwards, president of the PRWC, seemed to sum up the “why” behind the women’s running boom the best.
“ Having been a couch potato … when you get to the point where you are active, you just don’t feel right when you don’t do something every day,” she said.
“We all lead busy lives; I know I find it hard to maintain friendships when juggling work, family and volunteer commitments,” she continued. “To fit in exercise and friendships [through running], I get the benefit of this great social group that I care about and who cares about me.”
For information about the Pioneer Valley Women’s Running Club, visit
www.pvwrc.org . Other clubs include the Western Mass Athletic Club,
www.runwmac.com.
