Showing our age

Damian Hall, age 46, leads the way on Dartmoor at the weekend

I spent last weekend hosting another running retreat alongside the brilliant ultra runner Damian Hall and our movement maestro Joe Kelly, and while it was great fun, it was also hard work.

It’s always interesting being with Damian as I remember being intrigued by his journey when I first started ultra running. Here was a journalist, like me (I used to commission him to write pieces for the Guardian), with similar best times in road races as me (in fact I was slightly faster), and at a similar age to me (he's one year younger), who was starting to do surprisingly well in these long ultra trail races: finishing just outside the top 10 at the UTMB, setting some impressive FKTs, and getting selected to run for Great Britain in the World Trail Running Championships.

A thought settled in the back of my mind: maybe I’ll be the same. Maybe I’ll be even better.

Alas, while Damian seemed to get better and better the further he ran, the opposite turned out to be true for me. I soon realised that having a fast 10K time didn’t count for much when it came to running 100 miles in the mountains. 

Over this past weekend, Damian took us through his story, showing us some amazing photographs from his races. A few years ago - in 2018 - he finished fifth in the UTMB, which is undeniably the world’s most competitive trail ultra, with over 100 elite runners on the start line, and another 2,500 very serious ultra runners behind them - even to qualify to run the race is quite a challenge. 

However, last year he dropped out of the race, and when we asked him if he would go back and try again, he said that he might do one day, but that he knows he’ll never beat his fifth place finish, and so the motivation to go back is no longer as strong.

One of the guests questioned this thought process. He said it was only a few years since Damian finished fifth; and ultra runners are known for being able to compete at the highest level at an older age than in most other sports. So why was Damian writing himself off already?

It was a good question, and Damian was a bit stumped - in fact he said he felt a bit inspired by the question. He said he was just trying to be realistic, but maybe he wasn’t too old?

It reminded me of the Kenyans. Many runners there have no idea how old they are. In rural Kenya, birthdays aren’t recorded - at least they weren’t until fairly recently. And so age isn’t really that important. Most people don’t celebrate birthdays or even know how old they are. When Kenyans start to run and train seriously, they consider themselves as juniors, regardless of the amount of time they have been alive. They are juniors when it comes to running.

I remember asking a guy clearly closer to 40 than 20 why he was entering the junior race at a cross country event in Eldoret, and he said he wasn’t ready for the senior race yet. “Maybe next year I will have enough experience,” he said. 

This can cause consternation among the rest of the world when Kenyan “juniors” turn up and win world titles against real teenagers from the rest of the world, and that is understandable, of course. But I love the way they have no regard for age as a factor in how fast they should be running.

This also means that by the time they hit their 40s, many Kenyans are officially still only in their early 30s, and are still going strong. Take, for example, the greatest of the them all, Eliud Kipchoge. In 2003, Kipchoge won the world title at 5000m on the track when he was supposedly just 18 - outkicking the two biggest stars of the day, Kenenisa Bekele and Hicham El Guerrouj. If you look at a picture from that race (below), there is no way that Kipchoge is 18. 

Kipchoge after winning gold in Paris in 2003

I’ve met people in Kenya who say they were at school with him and that he is at least 10 years older than his official birth date, which would have been fixed as a junior when he first started running. 

Officially he is 37 years old. 

Wait. What? That means (if we assume he’s 10 years older, and it could actually be more) that a 46-year-old destroyed the Olympic field for the second time in a row in Tokyo last year? That means that the guy who ran the mind-blowing sub 2-hour marathon in 2019 was 44?

No one, not even Kipchoge probably, knows his precise age, but this isn’t just wild speculation on my behalf. Sit in any training camp in Kenya, even in Kipchoge’s own training camp, as I have done, and ask the athletes, off the record, how old they think Eliud is, and they’ll all start debating it. And no one will say anything less than 40.

But by not knowing, and not really caring, Kipchoge, and many other Kenyans, are somehow liberated from preconceptions about age. They just run. If they feel good, if they’re still fast, than that’s great. Age isn’t relevant. Of course age will eventually slow Kipchoge down, that's unavoidable, but it isn’t a mental barrier to performance if you don’t acknowledge it. And as Kipchoge shows, perhaps that’s the way it first starts to slow you down.

So Maybe Damian shouldn’t be writing off his chances of a top 3 place at UTMB just yet. After all, he’s still only a fairly sprightly 46.