Oh, Hey, I Know This Woman....

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My farming friend Sandy just sent me to a New York Times story on how taking up hard exercise in middle age can not just hold back Father Time but turn you into an enviable athlete. I was reading along and squeeled when I saw this passage:

And there are people like Imme Dyson, a 71-year-old runner who lives in Princeton, N.J. She took up running when she was 48 and loved it, she says, from the moment she put on a pair of running shoes. Her daughter, who had been a college triathlete, told her how to train.

“She said, ‘Mom, if your workout didn’t hurt, you didn’t work hard enough,’ ” Ms. Dyson said.

“Working consistently really is the recipe,” she said. And it has made a difference for her, allowing her to run races, from 5K to marathons, so fast that she is consistently among the best in the nation in her age group. She has run a 15K cross-country race in 1:19:08, a pace of 8:29 a mile. And she ran a 10K race in 51 minutes 50 seconds, a pace of 8:20 a mile.


I met Imme this summer; she's got a lot of friends in the San Diego Track Club. Imme's even mentioned in her husband's wiki entry as an accomplished masters runner. The article didn't leave me feeling any better since I'm the opposite: an early-life runner who's body's just gone to pot. But for you who took up running late in life, hooray.

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