Milton: Wearing 15-year-old running shoes, Ed Whitlock raced through wind and rain at the Toronto Marathon to break the men’s 85–89 age group world record by more than 30 minutes. His 3:56:33 shattered the previous mark of 4:34:55, set in 2004, as reported by Runner’s World.
After crossing the finish line, Whitlock, 85, of Milton, Ontario, told Canadian Running he thought he went out too fast in the opening miles and went through a bad patch at 25K, but he forged on with heavy legs to break the four-hour barrier.
“I was thinking that this was going to be an absolute disaster,” he said. “I was well under four-hour pace at that point,” he added.
On Thursday morning, Whitlock told CBC News that he actually came through a bit shy of his orginal goal of 3:50.
Whitlock has been defying the aging athlete odds for decades. At 73, he ran 2:54 in the marathon — a time that runners half that age would consider a major achievement.
He owns masters age group world records on the track and roads from distances of 1,500 meters to the marathon. Whitlock prefers to run around a cemetery near his home, where he keeps his training relatively slow.
He runs laps for three or three and a half hours at a time, unbothered by traffic or the eternal inhabitants or the modern theories and gadgets of training.
“He’s about as close as you can get to minimal aging in a human individual,” said Dr Michael Joyner, a researcher at the Mayo Clinic who has studied performance and aging.
