Episode 7 – Dr. Tonya K. Olson | Feet, Curiosity, and Keeping Ultrarunners Moving

Forty years after he raced down the Streif at Kitzbuhel, Doug Lewis went back and ran up it. In August 2026, at sixty-two years old, Doug started the KAT100 by UTMB in Austria - nearly ninety-nine miles through the Kitzbuhel Alps with something close to twenty-eight thousand feet of climbing. A thunderstorm broke over the six o'clock start and the rain ran on for five hours into the night. Fifty-eight miles in, the course sent him up the Hahnenkamm, the mountain he had raced down in a speed suit as a twenty-two-year-old on the US Ski Team. He finished in a little over twenty-nine hours, twenty-third overall, and won the men's sixty to sixty-four category by more than thirteen hours. He is a two-time Olympian in the alpine downhill - Sarajevo in 1984, Calgary in 1988 - and at the 1985 World Championships in Bormio he became the first American man ever to win a World Championship medal in a speed event. He took two national downhill titles after that. He was five foot eight and a hundred and seventy-five pounds in a sport that rewards size, and he made the Streif, the most dangerous downhill in the world, work for him anyway. Then he retired at twenty-five and, in his own words, lost his identity. He went from Sports Illustrated to sitting in the back of an introductory economics class as a twenty-six-year-old freshman. What pulled him out was an offer to coach a group of ten- and eleven-year-olds, and that turned into ELITEAM, the conditioning camp he and his wife Kelley have run for thirty-five years. Two hundred and fifty burpees a day. Lights out at nine. As a ski racer he hated running. The team ran a two-mile fitness test every year and he scraped under the twelve-minute limit every year. Somewhere after he stopped racing, that turned into a question about how far he could go, and the answer has so far been nine hundred-mile finishes and no DNFs. Doug is the first person who ever found this show on his own and asked to be on it, and this conversation is the one he came for. He talks about going into the dark hole seven or nine or eleven times in a single race and the tools he uses to climb back out. He talks about winning the first Spartan Death Race in 2007 with a peanut butter sandwich and a knife in his pack, and having dinner beforehand with an unknown man named David Goggins. He talks about the night in Italy when he could not stand up straight for the last fifteen miles, and what Kelley said to him afterwards that changed how he saw it. He talks about being frightened - and about the one place he refused to let fear come with him. There is a quieter thread underneath it too. At sixty-two he has noticed his mobility going, and he is honest about not knowing whether that is age or neglect. He had a full blood workup and a cardiac scan this year because Kelley told him to, and he spends a few minutes asking everyone listening to do the same. He is sixty-two. He is looking for his tenth hundred-miler - around seventeen thousand feet of climbing, runnable, somewhere beautiful enough to stop and feel lucky - and he would like your suggestions. For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

He spent twenty-six years in the Army running two to four miles a day at somebody else's pace, and when he retired he decided he was finished with running for good. He sat on the couch for about a decade. He was fifty-six when he asked his wife to walk around the block with him. He started running ahead to the stop signs and jogging back to her. After a few weeks she told him to stop waiting and just go. Jeff Stafford is sixty-nine years old. This June he finished the Last Annual Heart of the South — three hundred fifty-five miles across the American South, eight days and two hours, fourth overall. He was the oldest finisher in the sixty-to-sixty-nine age group. Thirteen runners that age started the race. Six of them finished. The Heart of the South is Lazarus Lake's journey run. You leave your car in a field in Georgia, get on a bus, and nobody tells you where it's going. The route arrives on your phone the night before. Then you walk home. No aid stations, no crew, no pacers. You resupply at gas stations and Dollar Generals and you sleep where you can. Before any of that, Jeff flew helicopters. Fifteen years in UH-1 Hueys, then Little Birds with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, carrying Rangers and Delta and SEAL Team Six to places nobody talks about. He retired in 2001, two months before September eleventh. He is the best explanation this show has yet found for why so many of these runners come out of that world: the no-fail mission. Everything is training until suddenly it isn't, and then the only acceptable outcome is finishing. As he puts it, the DNFs that hurt are the ones where you failed yourself. Tim Hardy is back in the chair as guest co-host — the two of them met on the road at Vol State in 2019 and recognized each other as Army before either said so. They cover a lot of ground. The first hundred-miler, which came after a DNF at mile sixty-eight. Five Strolling Jims and three sub-seven shirts. Old Dominion with fourteen minutes to spare. Big Barkley in 2024. Why he prefers the Heart of the South to Vol State, and why he volunteers at Vol State anyway — taking finishers' photographs at the Rock and driving people who can't drive themselves up and down the mountain all night. And two stories from this June that don't sound like ultrarunning at all. The morning he crossed Atlanta on the MARTA train, exhausted, knowing nothing about public transit, and simply asked the first local he saw for help — while other runners in the same race lost six hours because they wouldn't. And the elderly man with the white beard and the one cloudy eye who nodded at him on that train, and then turned up again the next day, a hundred miles west, in a McDonald's. Near the end Mark makes him an argument. Jeff turns seventy shortly after the new year. Attrition thins the seventy-to-seventy-nine group to almost nothing, and Jeff hasn't slowed much. Those records are sitting there. Jeff's own goal is different, and he says it plainly: he wants to be the oldest person ever to officially start the Barkley Marathons. For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

At ten years old, Lance Griffiths showered at the gym because there was no hot water at home. His father was a competitive bodybuilder who used coconut oil before every session, so the boy went to school smelling of coconuts and was bullied for it. The name they gave him was Coco. Fifty-four years later it is the only name anyone uses.

Andy Croom Mathews is a Florida history teacher who became a race director almost by accident and an ultrarunner almost by eavesdropping. In 2001, at 39, he overheard two men in their fifties talking about something called the Vermont 100. His thought was simple: if these guys can do it, I can do it. He mailed in a paper application with a check, flew to New Hampshire without arranging a ride to the start, packed his drop bags in the wrong order, and finished in twenty-three hours and eight minutes. He had to ask the race director whether he'd broken twenty-four, because his watch had died. Twenty-five years later he has around fifty hundred-mile finishes, a left arm rebuilt with metal after a chainsaw accident, and no vision in his right eye following a stroke he returned to work from on Monday. This conversation is built around two runs. Last July, at 63, he ran the Last Annual Vol State Road Race - 314 miles across Tennessee in the July heat, from the banks of the Mississippi to the Georgia line. It is one of Lazarus Lake's journey races: no crew, no pacers, no aid stations, and no getting into a vehicle for any reason. Runners resupply at gas stations and Dollar Generals, sleep where they can, and rely on locals who set up canopies and coolers by the roadside. Andy finished 35th overall in seven days, thirteen hours and forty-seven seconds, fueled substantially by single-serve packets of Spam. Five months later, at 64, he ran 444 miles around the Florida National Scenic Trail - through swamp, past alligators, over a fence, alone except for his wife Amy in a truck. He missed the fastest known time by a couple of hours and finished anyway. In between there are the failures, and he is unusually good on them. A drop at the Moab 240 at mile 130 that he attributes squarely to sleep deprivation and one bad decision. A start at the Cowboy 200 he took on knowing he had COVID. Years in his fifties when he pulled out of races he could have finished because he wasn't going to break twenty-four hours and that mattered more to him than finishing. He describes the moment that stopped, and the friend he sought out as a mentor because she finishes everything she starts. He and Amy have run A1 Ultra Events since 2018, when they borrowed money to buy a struggling hundred-miler called the Long Haul. It had sixteen finishers. They cut the price to seventy-five dollars, handed a belt buckle to everyone who made the cutoff, earned nothing, and turned it into the only Western States qualifier in the third most populous state in the country. There is also a stranger in a Deadwood casino bar in 2011 who, hearing that this Florida man had just dropped out of a hundred-miler, told him he ought to be ashamed of himself attempting something like that at his age. Andy was 49. He went home, trained through the winter, and at 50 ran the fastest hundred of his life - nineteen hours and fifty-six minutes at Heartland, sixth overall. He has been collecting at-your-age moments ever since. On September 25 he goes back to Nebraska for the Cowboy 200, the race he abandoned last year. He'll be 65. For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

In this episode of Run Long After 60, I sit down with Neville McKeown — a 70-year-old from Durban, South Africa, who found me on Instagram lifting weights with a smile on his face, and who turned out to have one of the most remarkable stories I have ever put on this show.