A 70-year-old woman became the oldest woman to finish an ultramarathon this week in California, officially eliminating any excuse you may have come up with not to run today.
It was one of the most dramatic finishes in 42 years of the Western States Endurance Run—and it wasn’t for first place. With just 90 seconds left before the 30-hour cutoff time and 300 meters to go in the 100.2 mile race on Sunday, Gunhild Swanson, 70, of Spokane Valley, Washington, dug deep to became the oldest woman to complete the course in a time of 29 hours, 59 minutes, and 54 seconds.
Swanson said that she actually ran a few extra miles after she got a little lost toward the end of the race.
I got pretty comfortable, thinking everything was going to be fine and then disaster happened. At about mile 88, my pacer and I made a terrible rookie mistake and came up the trail and to the left there were a couple runners and followed them rather than looking for the markers. We should have turned right. We got all the way up a steep hill over a mile-and-a-half or so and had to come back down. So, I got three bonus miles. AND THEN… that was coming into the mile 90 aid station and I was back into cutoff times. I can’t make it up. I don’t have enough legs to make it up. So I thought I was done. Physically I just couldn’t do it. I came into the aid station at the highway and Dave, my friend, took over as pacer. He said, “Let’s move it.” I just went straight through the aid station, straight out, and he told me what to do. “Okay, you can run here. You can hike this uphill. Watch your footing. There’s rocks there. There’s loose dirt there.” He talked me through it. Then I still had to hike up that hard stuff coming up to Robie Point from No Hands.
(Thanks to Runner’s World for bringing this to our attention)
