Joan Benoit Samuelson celebrates her 60th birthday on May 16, which puts her in a new age group and gives her another milestone to aim for: She wants to be the first woman in her sixties to run sub-three hours in the marathon.
Her past decade hasn’t been quiet. She ran 2:47:50 at age 53, still the single-age world best. At 55, she nailed the 55–59 age-group world record, and her 2:50:33 still stands.
Now, at 60, she’s talking sub-three in the way she does, quietly and modestly, just a task she will enjoy. But it has never been done. The world record for the 60–64 age group is 3:01:30, by the feisty, powerful Bernie Portenski of New Zealand, who ran that time in 2010.
Samuelson has the Chicago Marathon on October 8 in mind as her opportunity to displace Portenski, who died of cancer in February.
Samuelson is best known for being the first Olympic gold medalist in the women’s marathon in 1984. She set the marathon world record in 1983 with her 2:22:43 in Boston, and two years later, the 2:21:21 she ran in Chicago was an American record. That time is still fourth on the U.S. all-time list.
Related: The sport's leading lady for three decades.
An untold story of running is Samuelson’s rebound to world record form as she has moved through the age groups. One of the most howling errors on Wikipedia is the sentence in the Samuelson entry that begins, “Since her retirement from competitive running...”
Injuries and raising two children restricted her through her 30s and 40s, but she never opted for being a non-combatant celebrity. Her understated remarks about “still having stories to tell” conceal a deep passion for racing as well as running.
Running a sub-three at 60 would be a barrier broken almost on an Ed Whitlock scale.
Related: Ed Whitlock Forever Altered Ideas of Human Endurance in Older Age
This weekend, Samuelson will participate in a non-competitive event, giving back in the ways that have defined her in recent years—by celebrating a running friendship, supporting a good cause, and affirming her loyalty to Maine. On May 21, she will run the Sugarloaf Marathon or 15K in Kingfield, Maine, with Michael Westphal, a friend from her high school days who has Parkinson’s, to raise funds for the Michael J. Fox Foundation.
“It’s a low-key run with an old friend,” Samuelson said.
That outing near home will come as a welcome break after weeks of hectic celebrity demands. Samuelson has been speaker, spokesperson, or working VIP in quick succession at the Boston Marathon, the Nike sub-two-hour marathon project in Monza, Italy, and the 2024 Olympic bid presentation in Los Angeles. On May 26, she will be in Eugene, Oregon, for Joan Benoit Samuelson Night at Hayward Field during the Prefontaine Classic.
“It’s a crazy month,” she said in Boston. A prelude to what could be, for the record books, a crazy year.
Roger Robinson is a highly-regarded writer and historian and author of seven books on running. His recent Running Throughout Time: the Greatest Running Stories Ever Told has been acclaimed as one of the best ever published. Roger was a senior writer for Running Times and is a frequent Runner’s World contributor, admired for his insightful obituaries. A lifetime elite runner, he represented England and New Zealand at the world level, set age-group marathon records in Boston and New York, and now runs top 80-plus times on two knee replacements. He is Emeritus Professor of English at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and is married to women’s running pioneer Kathrine Switzer.
