‘You have to find something else to motivate you’

Barbara Stevens is a 65-year-old endurance runner with Redhill Road Runners. Her marathon PB is 2:58:57, set in 1996. But she stopped running after a serious illness and only started again in her late 50s. She regularly wins vets races and scores well into the 80% age gradings.

I would’ve absolutely loved to run when I was a girl in the 1960s, but there were just no opportunities then. Even when

I did start in the 1980s, you never saw women running around on the road. There was no parkrun or Couch to

5K, and you couldn’t really join a club unless you could run already.

On my very first run, I went into the countryside so no one would see. I needn’t have worried because I couldn’t run more than 50 yards without stopping. But I poked away at it and, eventually, after a few weeks, I didn’t give a toss about who saw me. But you did get a lot of negative comments in those days, so you had to really not care.

We’ve come a long way, though.

Back in the 1980s and even 1990s when I started doing races, maybe 10% of any local road race would be women. In those days, I used to win a lot of races, but women always got vastly inferior prizes. The men would get stereos and TVs; the women would get domestic appliances, such as irons and vacuum cleaners. I’ve got a wonderful selection of crystal, but I’d rather have had the TV.

I did a lot of racing in my thirties, winning the Robin Hood Marathon (in 2:59:41) and the Taunton Marathon (2:58:57). But then, just before my

40th birthday, I became seriously ill. I was in hospital for four weeks and had three major bowel operations. I was less than 6st when I came out and lucky to be alive. After you are really ill like that, everything changes. My daughter was seven years old and it really upset me – it still does now – to think that she very nearly didn’t have a mummy. I just didn’t feel the same about running. I got a horse, got really into riding, and I didn’t run at all for about 12 years.

Then in 2014, I came back to it. My mother died and I thought, right, I’ll raise some money for the hospital that looked after her. Surely I could do a half marathon in my sleep. So I set myself a target of 1:39. And I did it – but it nearly killed me. Agony doesn’t even begin to describe it. The last couple of miles were just absolutely running on my guts.

But I kept on running. Coming back when you’re that age, you are slower, so you have to find something else to motivate you, such as looking at your age-grading performance. For me,

I aim to have those consistently over 80%. Frank Shorter [who won marathon gold at the 1972 Olympics] said that his aim was to slow down as slowly as he could – that’s what I’m trying to do.

These days, I go out running about five times a week; more than that and I find fatigue sets in. Usually, there would be an interval session if I was specifically training for a race. But a lot of it is just long, slow distance running. I do weights, too, because at my age, you need to think about muscle wastage. And being a horsey person, I do a lot of upper-body work mucking out, and so on.

In March 2020, just before the lockdown, I did the Sleaford Half Marathon in 1:46. But if I do a half these days, I know all about it afterwards. Gone are the days when I could do one every weekend. Now I need a couple of weeks off – it’s true that the recovery takes longer, but I also really appreciate rest now. I often read top runners say they look back and wish they had rested more.’