THE PRIME OF THE ANCIENT MARATHONER
What Ed Whitlock can do in a race could change the way we think about ageing
By Michael McGowan
Source: www.saturdaynight.ca
Ed Whitlock will turn seventy in March. Chances are you’ve never heard of him. Seeing Ed on the street, you probably wouldn’t give him a second look. His eyes are slightly watery with a hint of red around the lower lids, and his voice has thinned and become tremulous with age. His hair – a full head of it, granted – is snow-white. He might pass for being a few years younger than his age, but then again, at five feet seven inches and 122 pounds, there’s a frailty that makes him seem all of his seven decades.
But the frailty is an illusion that disappears as soon as Whitlock starts to run. Anyone at the finish line of the Scotia bank Half Marathon in Toronto last September might have been excused for believing Whitlock had pulled a Rosie Ruiz and taken the subway: he finished sixty-sixth out of the event’s 2,749 competitors in a time of 1:20:18. A little quick math reveals that he averaged 6:12 per mile. Having trouble relating? Go to your local 400-metre track and try to run once around it in ninety-three seconds (a feat that would leave most people winded). That’s the pace Whitlock maintained for over thirteen miles.
A month later he travelled to Ohio for the Columbus Marathon, and completed the 26.2-mile distance in 2:52:50, placing seventy-second out of 3,428 runners and setting a world record for his age. The next youngest person to beat him was fifty-one, and even then Ed was only nine seconds behind – a virtual photo finish by marathon standards. To put this effort into perspective, the qualifying time for the Boston Marathon, long considered an elite marathoner’s marathon, is anything below 3:10 – and that applies to men between eighteen and thirty-four. For Ed’s age group, the cut-off time is 3:50 – almost a full hour slower than the time he actually ran. Another way of looking at his performance: in 1908, the world record was held by American Johnny Hayes. His time? 2:55:19.
This year Ed Whitlock hopes to become the first septuagenarian to break the three-hour barrier for the marathon – an accomplishment that could be considered as significant as Roger Bannister’s legendary breaking of the four-minute mile in 1954. If he doesn’t get injured or “hit by a bus” (a mode of dying that he brings up with surprising regularity in conversation), he will eventually completely rewrite the over-seventy record book, smashing marks for all distances from 1,500 metres and up.
Pioneers of human achievement expand the possible; pioneers of human endurance revise the credible. Whether it’s Sir Edmund Hillary climbing Everest or Charles Lindbergh crossing the ocean in a piece of metal, world records that touch on the physical have a way of quickly transforming the previously unthinkable into the routine.
Ageing is one of the last physical frontiers. What Ed Whitlock does is to fundamentally challenge the popular assumption that growing old is a slow, inevitable dance to decrepitude. His running exploits seem to be a call to re-evaluate our basic assumptions about ageing and performance. But that presupposes that we can generalize from Ed. Is anything he does applicable to the rest of us? Is he a pioneer for the population at large, one whose
The answer matters, because whether it’s grit or genes, the secret to Ed Whitlock’s prowess has one large implication – the mortality of us all. Born in 1931, Ed Whitlock grew up in the suburbs of London, England, where he participated in track and cross-country. Though he was admittedly both “serious and competitive,” he was by no means an outstanding runner. After graduating from University of London armed with a degree in mining engineering, he immigrated to Canada in 1952 and started working in Sudbury for Falconbridge. “To the best of my knowledge,” he says, “there wasn’t another person running up there at all.” At that point in his life, the loneliness of a long-distance runner wasn’t very appealing; he quit the sport and didn’t take it up again until two children – and almost two decades – later. At forty-one, he started racing in middle-distance events like the 800 metres and 1,500 metres, quickly excelling in masters competitions (for athletes over 40), and eventually winning the World Masters Championships in 1979 for the 1,500 metres in the forty-five to forty-nine division. Impressive as his gold medal was, masters track-and-field competition was (and remains) a fringe sporting pursuit at best. In his fifties, busy with work and his family, Whitlock scaled back his racing schedule.
His commitment to running became full-fledged again when he retired. Now living just west of Toronto in Milton, Ontario, with ample time on his hands and less than exemplary patience for household chores, Whitlock decided to resume training – this time with a vengeance. Because a nagging Achilles tendon injury prevented him from doing the speed work necessary to excel at shorter distances, he began the process of converting himself into a long-distance runner.
Ed Whitlock doesn’t eat a special diet, take vitamin pills, monitor his weight, do push-ups, sit-ups, or visualization exercises, wear a Walkman, stretch, carry a water bottle, or do much of anything besides run. His training regime is staggeringly simple. Each morning, after downing a few cups of tea and a couple of slices of toast, he does a leisurely five-minute ride on his stationary bike, “just to move the legs around,” before heading out the door of his Milton home to the Evergreen Cemetery, located two blocks away. There he simply jogs around the same third-of-a-mile loop over and over again. Alone. In classic understatement, Whitlock says, “It’s a very standard route. Sometimes I get forced by other activity in the cemetery to make changes.” Because he doesn’t keep track of how far he goes, any estimate he makes is rough, but Whitlock figures he put in over 5,000 miles on that loop last year, an effort that would have humbled Forrest Gump.
Whitlock refuses to train anywhere else. It’s not that he has a plot picked out and wants to keep an eye on his daisies, but out on the streets, he notes, “cars tend to aim at you, whereas in the cemetery they’re a more docile lot.” More importantly, the solitude of the cemetery keeps Whitlock’s competitive instincts in check. “My kids say I’m insane. The thing is if I’m going to do a loop around town, which is ten miles, I always start speeding up.” Too embarrassed to be “seen logging nine-minute miles” by his fellow Miltonians, in town he’ll pick up the pace to protect his dignity. In the cemetery, on the other hand, the residents don’t care how fast he goes. Without that pressure, “you don’t know how far you’ve gone and your only objective is that you have to go out for two hours,” Whitlock says, “so you might as well take it easy.”
The regimen, day in and day out, is close to unimaginable; I ask if he’s some sort of pain glutton. “I find it a drag,” he acknowledges, before adding resignedly. “It’s just something that has to be done.” Running at a pace he considers a glorified shuffle, Whitlock’s only goal is “to go out there and put in the time” – the training time, that is, necessary to keep his racing times “competitive.” Though Whitlock “likes the scene” associated with races and says that “long-distance runners are good people,” for him, everything else is drudgery.
His resignation seems even more remarkable when you ask him about the so-called “runner’s high,” the claim other runners make that their lengthy forays somehow induce a blissful state of euphoria. “I don’t experience any runner’s high or anything like that,” he says. “Most of the time when I’m running around there I’m thinking how soon will this be finished, more than anything else.” The philosophy behind Whitlock’s training is based on the astonishing long-distance times achieved by Kenyan runners, who, he points out, developed their endurance by running to and from school as children. “Presumably they weren’t running terribly fast when they were doing it,” he says. It’s an unorthodox approach: most world-class distance marathoners mix long, slow distance runs like Whitlock’s with a couple of speed sessions each week, in what runners call fartlek (a Swedish word that literally means “speed-play”). Whitlock, though, feels he gets all the speed he can handle from the actual twenty-five to thirty races he runs a year. Exercise physiologist and running guru Dr. Jack Daniels doesn’t disagree. “Each person has the best training method for that particular person. Some principles apply, but who knows what is best?”
If there is a secret to Whitlock’s seeming ability to defy the decline in performance inherent in ageing, it’s that he continues to increase his workload. “I don’t think you ever really stop the slide,” he says. “You can’t do that. If you train the same way you did last year, all things being equal, you’re going to run a slower time. The only way you can hold your own is by doing more training.” But, he adds, “That’s got to be self-limiting by the end.”
“Self-limiting,” in his case, is a relative term. In the late 1990s Whitlock could barely manage two hours of training a day. Two years later, on the afternoon I first met him, he told me his legs were “a bit shattered fortnight stretch of three-hour runs,” and he’d consequently decided to “back off a bit.” That morning he had only gone two and a half hours. Besides the steady increase in workload, what’s remarkable about Whitlock’s training is the absolute volume. “I wouldn’t have believed a seventy-year-old could run for two or three hours a day,” says Dr. Mark Bayley, Medical Director of the Neuro Rehabilitation Program at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, and a doctor with many elderly patients. “I wouldn’t have expected that anyone would have been able to sustain that training level for any period without getting injured.” Bayley’s reasoning? As the body ages, it progressively loses its ability to regenerate damaged cells. The result is a loss of muscle mass, decreased cardiovascular endurance, joint stiffness, ligament fragility, and a higher susceptibility to injury. Put simply, the elderly don’t get up nearly as quickly when they fall down.
So why can Ed Whitlock do what most of his contemporaries – not to mention most of us – can’t? To answer the question, I persuaded him to come to The High Performance Specialists, a clinic in North Toronto that helps athletes and teams improve performance. On the exercise-room walls, autographed Maple Leafs’ jerseys attest to the players who have taken advantage of the clinic’s services.
Valerie Skeffington, a conditioning specialist at the clinic, first used a pair of calipers to calculate Ed’s body fat. She took skin-fold measurements from six areas of his body. Normally, in a healthy person Ed’s age, one would expect to see measurements somewhere between 15 to 25 percent. If this sounds high, keep in mind that one depressing side effect of ageing is a tendency to get fatter. According to Dr. Bayley, “What happens with ageing is you get decreased testosterone and your muscle mass generally goes down, so the body replaces it with fat or connective tissue.” Studies have also shown that men lose their muscle mass twice as fast as women.
But on the body-fat test Ed measured an astounding 9.5 percent. Dr. Michael Clarfield, an MD specializing in sports medicine (he’s also the Toronto Maple Leafs’ team doctor) put this number in perspective. “You can’t really get below seven or eight percent without worrying about anorexia.” What this means in practical terms is that Whitlock’s system doesn’t have to lug extra fat around; it also means he’s been able to sustain his muscle mass – something no one’s overly surprised at, given his training, but a fact that would normally be totally unexpected. Next, the clinic’s technicians measured Whitlock’s “max-VO2” – the maximum oxygen that a body can process. The fitter the athlete, the more oxygen he or she can use, and the higher the max-VO2 number. From football players to speed skaters, elite athletes often subject themselves to this gruelling test in order to find out what kind of shape they’re in. Whitlock was hooked up to an oxygen-intake apparatus, and each breath he took was analyzed for levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide. Using this raw data a computer calculated his “max-VO2,” his maximal aerobic capacity.
The VO2 test was performed on a treadmill. In max-VO2 tests, pushing the subject to exhaustion is acknowledged as the only way to measure true fitness. Because the testers control both the speed and incline of the treadmill, and because there’s a little masochist in all of us, vomiting is not an unheard-of side effect. Neither is blacking out.
When the test began, the scattering of folks in the clinic lifting weights, stretching, and riding stationary bikes didn’t pay much attention. Ten minutes into Ed’s session, interest had picked up. Dennis Lindsay, director of the clinic, motioned for me to come behind the treadmill to get a different perspective on our subject. Lindsay pointed out the symmetry in Whitlock’s body. He marvelled at Whitlock’s muscle tone. “He’s a very fluid runner.” Aside from some rigidity in the left foot, Ed was a study in efficiency. His shoulders didn’t stoop, and he ran erect. All of which supports Jack Daniels’s assertion that “running technique and basic biomechanical structure probably prevents breakdown.”
As Whitlock continued to pound away, I kept looking at the heart-rate monitor, hoping, frankly, that we weren’t going to kill him in the name of journalistic curiosity. What experts expect for a seventy-year-old, even one in excellent shape, is for the heart rate to hit an upper limit somewhere around 150 beats per minute (using the standard textbook calculation of 220 bpm, minus a person’s age). For a few seconds Whitlock flirted with 178 bpm; his average over a thirty-second period was 168. A doctor who didn’t know anything else about Ed except his age, and noticed his heart was beating that fast, would have concluded he was experiencing a massive coronary and called for an ambulance.
At fifteen minutes, with the treadmill on a twenty-two-degree incline and the belt spinning at five miles per hour, even a couple of repair guys had stopped working to watch Ed run. He was clearly in the zone, staring straight ahead, refusing to surrender to the test. Val Skeffington shook her head and muttered, “He’s a machine.” Whitlock lasted 16:41 before the testers were satisfied that he had maxed out. He also kept all his breakfast down.
Analyzing the test results, Skeffington stated flatly that Whitlock “throws everything you learn in a textbook completely out the window.” Though it should be remembered that the max-VO2 test yields only a rough estimate of potential, the score for a physically active person Ed Whitlock’s age is usually somewhere around 35. (Not surprisingly, as we get older our bodies become less efficient and our max-VO2s decrease.) Whitlock’s measured 52.8. The translation? According to Val Skeffington, “He’s at the fitness level of a person in his mid-twenties.” Jack Daniels, who has put countless runners on the treadmill, says 52.8 correlates to a sub-three-hour marathon. He notes that Whitlock “could certainly go a lot faster depending on how efficiently he runs.”
With the spirit of inquiry firmly kick-started, we turned our attention to Ed’s blood: perhaps there was something floating among his platelets that would explain his prowess. “I’d be curious to know if his hemoglobin, testosterone, or growth-hormone levels are higher than the average person’s,” Dr. Bayley mused. “Those are levels that are supposed to drop off.” Because Whitlock also shared this curiosity (on a somewhat milder level), he drove in from Milton again to downtown Toronto to have two vials of his blood extracted and sent to the lab for analysis. When the results came back two weeks later, though, they didn’t point to anything markedly different from the results of most people his age. His rate of hemoglobin (which is responsible for the blood’s ability to carry oxygen) was average, as were his electrolytes (critical for maintaining nerve, muscle, and circulatory systems). Hormonal studies of testosterone revealed that Whitlock was actually at the low end of the normal range – not unusual in the older population at large, but somewhat surprising in his case, considering that testosterone kick-starts muscle regeneration. The measurements for levels of other hormones, including thyroid (which regulates the body’s metabolic rate), again indicated nothing out of the ordinary. All of which prompted Dr. Bayley to inform Whitlock, “You don’t have a hormonal advantage over your peers.”
What Whitlock’s lack of bionic blood means is that his achievements cannot simply be dismissed as a mutation. Which in turn reduces the separation between him and us by a few fascinating degrees. Not surprisingly, the most important thing Ed Whitlock may have working for him is genetics. His is a family of lengthy life spans. His father lived into his eighties (in Canada the average lifespan for a man is seventy-six), and his mother died at ninety-three. However, it was one of Whitlock’s paternal uncles who was off-the-charts old (a fact that Whitlock failed to mention until our third interview). When Uncle Arthur Whitlock died last year at 107, he was the second-oldest man in England. This longevity dna on the family tree prompts Whitlock to comment, “I suspect I’ll make old bones.” Dr. Bayley believes there may be more to it than that. “You wonder if physiologically ages more slowly.” In other words, there may be some sort of built-in mechanism in his own genetic makeup recognizing that Ed Whitlock is going to be around a lot longer than most of us, which correspondingly delays the ageing processes. According to studies published in the journal Physician and Sportsmedicine, “Age-related declines in cellular, tissue, and musculoskeletal-system function are far from uniform between individuals.” The journal continues, “differences in absolute values can be striking: One person at sixty-eight may function at a higher level than another at eighteen.” Which would go a long way in explaining why Whitlock doesn’t break down or get injured, in spite of the volume of training he subjects his body to.
Or then again, perhaps the most important advantage Whitlock has over the rest of us is his attitude. People have asked, when they hear about Ed’s training, if he is a lonely old man. They assume that someone who would devote so much time and energy to such an unlikely activity, at his age, surely must be using it as a substitute for friends, family, for a life. But Ed is married, has two sons, and doesn’t appear, at least to me, to be suffering from any sort of mental imbalance. “What I’m doing, I’m doing to be competitive,” he says. “To go out and drag myself around the cemetery all that time just for the sake of being fit, I don’t think I could do that.” What intrigues Whitlock is performance. While athletes like Wayne Gretzky and Michael Jordan can walk away from their professions at or near the height of their prowess, Whitlock is still trying to solve the equation of peak performance within the parameters of age. Though on the surface this passion may seem like an anomaly, it shouldn’t. As the developed world’s demographics increasingly skew older, and as medical advances continue to lengthen life spans, our conceptions of ageing are changing. What was once considered elderly numerically no longer applies. If anything is lagging, it’s society’s willingness to redefine the meaning of the word “old.”
Still, talking to Ed Whitlock, I never got the sense that he was a man obsessed. He does admit to having “a lot of dogged determination, I suppose,” but the day he came into the city for his blood test he missed his morning run and had no plans to make it up – an oversight that would usually be considered anathema in a sport where it’s not uncommon for individuals to have training streaks that extend for months, even years. Maybe most refreshing is his matter-of-fact attitude towards his quest. “I suppose it’s fairly important in my mind to do this, but it’s certainly of no great importance in the worldwide scope of things.” Perhaps, too, in spite of his protestations about the rigours of training, part of Ed Whitlock’s motivation might come from the sheer joy, after all these years, of being able to put one foot in front of the other. “I don’t really appreciate that I’m running differently than I was twenty years ago. I don’t feel as though I’m lumbering, but obviously I am – by comparison.” He pauses to consider. “I’ve some difficulty really understanding why I can run as well as I do. The best runners may not necessarily be the ones with the best raw ability, but the ones who are able to pound out the training.” And the ones, a listener thinks, who race not to beat someone else, but to wage a competition with themselves.
This may be why, although he could never have predicted his degree of running longevity when he first started out, Ed Whitlock refuses to predict the end of his career now. “I have no particular objectives to run when I’m eighty or anything like that. But I’ll run when I’m eighty if it goes like that.”
And here he adds what may be his true secret: “I don’t plan very far ahead in this life.”
I dunno, i competed in the same half marathon that this guy did http://www.personalbest.ca/Articles/article001.htm… he is 70, he ran 1.20… it was a flat race, but still thats damn impressive…
I think if you take care of your body, don’t over train, recovery sensibly, you will be fine, and able to live a nice, long, healthy life.
I know some research has come out recently talking about osteoprosis in cyclists, and i think there is a link there, but they link the primary cause to the fact that cycling is a non-load bearing activity, so if your sensibly hitting the weights, running and eating lots of yogurt and Ca rich food, you should be fine.
I personally would have my knees/sholders gradually fall apart than be ripped apart like can happen in a bad hit in any contact sport (football for example)…
but then again, i’m only 20, so hey, i really don’t have to worry about this whole aging thing for a while ;).