Age no barrier to elite running
Need New Year’s resolution inspiration? These four women will get you lacing up your running shoes.
Four Wellington women in their 40s are showing it’s never too late to lace up your running shoes.
And it’s fair to say Fiona Hayvice, Mel Stevens, Lindsay Barwick and Mel Aitken have really gone the distance over the past few years.
Hayvice competes on the Ultra-Trail World Tour and ran for New Zealand at the 2019 IAU 24-Hour World Championships, Aitken finished third at the 2019 Xterra Trail Running World Championships, while Barwick and Stevens sit in the top 10 for women’s marathon times in New Zealand this year.
But none took running seriously until after their 35th birthdays.
So what inspired them to pull on their running shoes and tackle some of the hardest races in the world of running? And what advice do they have for others starting out?
As you’d expect, similarities and subtle differences sit across their running journeys.
Hayvice, 44, started running during her high school years solely for wellbeing, and ran a marathon when she was 30, but it wasn’t until someone asked her to do the Gobi March in 2010 – a 250km six-stage race through the Gobi desert – that she started pushing out to the big distances.
These days, such distances are her forte. She recently completed her second 24-hour race at the world champs in France, finishing 34th after running 210.134km. She has been ranked in the top five female ultra trail runners in the world, won the prestigious Tarawera Ultramarathon 100km race in 2016 and has competed in 100-mile (161km) races in the United States.
She owns furniture company YOYO with her husband, Todd, and they have a seven-year-old son, Spike, so she fits her running around school hours as she works from home.
Running, for her, is about testing her limits, with one of her favourite quotes being from Victorian novelist George Elliot: ‘‘it’s never too late to be what you might have been’’.
Aitken, 42, has proven equally adept on the trails as the road. Her bronze at the Xterra worlds came on the back of winning the Tarawera 50km race, Wellington’s Round the Bays half marathon, the 85km Old Ghost Road Ultra, the Dunedin and Tauranga marathons, while she was second at the Auckland Marathon. She finished second overall – man or woman – at the New Zealand 100km championships in a time of 8.27.26.
All of this while working as one of New Zealand’s top cops as the National Manager Safer People at the rank of superintendent – she manages to fit her training in by running very early in the morning.
She started with running slowly, running one lamppost or tree, then walking one lamp-post or tree, at Dunedin’s Logan Park when she was 21 and training for the 2.4km police test.
Her first passion was horse riding, which she’d done since the age of 10, but she broke four vertebrae in her back in a fall about 13 years ago.
After her recovery, riding didn’t appeal as much. Her inability to sit still was still there, so she took up running. She built up slowly and for a long time would go out and run as far as she liked, around 20km most days.
Running, for her, started out as a necessity to get into the police before ‘‘it grew into what I call a passion, some call an addiction, but it’s a healthy addiction’’.
Stevens, 42, did a bit of running at primary school, but didn’t really come back to it until her late 30s when going through a marriage breakup.
‘‘I found myself as a single mum with three young kids and a busy job,’’ she said. ‘‘I kind of just wanted something else to focus on and it made me feel great. It was good meditation and reflection time as well.’’
Having her children half the time meant it was challenging to fit in running initially. She started out by cramming in as much running as possible in the week she didn’t have them. Then she got a treadmill in her lounge. Finally, it was the help of others, who would come round and look after the kids while she ran.
One such person was Todd Stevens, who she met at the Wellington Scottish Athletics Club and who she is now married to, and coached by.
‘‘It’s hard. People I talk to who say they wish they could do more walking or running, there’s always someone else you could put first. So you need that support from others to do it as well.
‘‘I would enlist friends, neighbours, or even my mum and dad, to say ‘hey, can you look after the kids for literally 90 minutes because I need to do this run’. It’s about sticking to that plan no matter what, even if it does mean enlisting the help of others.’’
Now, she has run a 2hr 57min marathon, came in the top 10 for 40-44-year-old women at the New York Marathon and won just about every race for her agegroup in the Wellington club running scene this season.
‘‘If someone said three years ago I’d be running subthree hour marathons I would have been like ‘haha, yeah right’ – I wouldn’t even have considered myself a runner, let alone an elite runner.’’
Barwick, 45, was passed by two men running dressed as Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble during her first half marathon about 13 years ago, finishing in a time of 2.10. Now, she has run a personal best of 2.54 for at this year’s London Marathon.
Such progression has not come easily, but Barwick said she has been determined to find out what her body and mind is capable of.
‘‘I just want to see how good I can be. That’s my main reason for continuing running. I’m 45 now and it’s obviously the older you get, at some point you’re going to have diminishing returns and you’re going to start to slow down, so I just want to see how much I can get out of my body till that starts to happen.
‘‘Whether my motivation will change, who knows, but that’s why I want to continue.’’
At this point, you might be thinking these women possess some sort of superpowers or know something you don’t about running to have gotten so good.
But as Barwick explains, it’s a simple recipe to get to where they have.
‘‘Consistent, well balanced training. There is no secret. That’s just what it is,’’ Barwick said.
"I’m not super talented, you can tell by the fact I ran 2.10 for my first half marathon and got overtaken by two people dressed as Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble.
‘‘I just worked really hard. If you want to get better you can. But you’ve got to want to do it and put the work in.’’
But how do you get there? Well, all these women started where everyone else starts: kilometre zero.
‘‘The first thing is to set yourself realistic goals’’ Hayvice said. ‘‘So if you’re coming from nothing, don’t go out there and try beat out 5km the first time. Start with 1km and build it up.’’
Stevens added: ‘‘It’s never too late. Just get out there. Like with any goal in life, if you do set a big goal like a marathon, just break it down and start small. I started with 5km runs around Karori. Commit to a schedule, something like three times a week, and then work your way up slowly.’’
Aitken said whatever your goal, achieving it should be something very personal, but urged people to be patient.
‘‘Any run that you do is an achievement. I get frustrated when I turn up to a race and someone says ‘oh, I’m only doing the 10km, when you’re doing the full marathon’. Actually, whatever distance you’re doing is awesome because you’re not sitting on a couch, you’re out doing it.
‘‘It’s not easy when you’re starting out running. It’s easy once you’re fit and you maintain a level of fitness. As you progress, you start to get into that enjoyment factor. Once you get fit, it actually is easy, and it’s fun. You don’t want to be doing something you absolutely hate. You want to be able to lace up and get excited about going for your run, which is where I’m at.’’
For others, they might already be running to a reasonable level, but want to make take that next step and achieve a new goal.
For all four, they hit new peaks when they got a coach. All of them were initially resistant to doing so, instead preferring to self-coach, but they all saw big improvements when they did finally get a coach.
‘‘I had no idea what I was doing,’’ Aitken said, even after she ran her first sub-three hour marathon.
‘‘I didn’t know the lessons about speed work, mixing up my runs. I basically did the same thing everyday. It would be a 20km run every day, not really thinking about pace or hills or what I should be doing.
‘‘I run seven days a week and having a coach has freed up my time as I’m not running those junk miles.’’
Barwick has started doing a bit of coaching herself and said a coach could help guide appropriate training levels.
‘‘I advise people to get a coach because it holds people back. That’s what people need to start off with. They get all enthusiastic, they get really into their running and want to do everything and do it too fast, and then they get injured and we don’t see them again. It’s hard to find that balance.’’
Coach or no coach. Runner or non-runner. The same fundamental point remains: the shoes don’t lace themselves. If you put the work in, you don’t have to wonder what you might have been.
‘‘It’s never too late. Just get out there.’’ Mel Stevens