AGE GROUP ACE: MARGIE STOLL

by Jeannine Renfro

It’s a choice you have to make: stay home and enjoy that fresh “cup of joe” or go out for a nice sweltering run on a hot, humid Tennessee morning. Coffee... Run… Coffee... Run?

It’s a tough decision, but it’s the one Margie Stoll makes many mornings. Instead of relaxing at home and sipping on her favorite morning beverage, Margie can be seen hitting the pavement or circling the track.
“About a mile into a 5K I always think to myself: Why am I doing this?” Margie asks, and then answers, “I could be at home drinking a cup of coffee!”
But four days a week she runs, and another one or two days she cross trains. The reward for this 65-year-old is getting up early several weekends a year just so she can run that 5K, 10K, 4-miler, 5-miler, or track race.

This “get up and go” attitude could explain her accomplishments: as of March 1, 2007, she holds 27 single-age state road records from 5K to the half-marathon distances. On the track, in 2006, she ranked as the #1 over-65 800-meter, 1500-meter, and 5000-meter runner in the nation, and ranked #2 at 400m.

But, surprisingly for a woman her age, she’s a relative rookie at the sport. Her racing career began one spring day in 2001. An avid reader and sports fan, Margie had kept up with The Tennessean’s running column each Monday in the Sports Section. She even read the published race results in the newspaper each week. She jogged in her neighborhood regularly to stay in shape, but had never participated in an organized running event. But one day she decided to find a race and run it, rather than just reading about it the following Monday, and that is just what she did on May 28, 2001. “I figured that if I didn’t t survive, they could just dig a hole and throw me in!” she jokes.

That was the day Margie entered into Nashville’s racing scene and local runners’ hearts when she ran the Memorial Day Dash 5K at the City Cemetery. Her time? An impressive 26:41. That’s an 8:36-per-mile clip. Not too shabby.

As a runner it is difficult to pinpoint when she first started running. Margie and her husband moved to the Washington, D.C. area shortly after they were married in the late ’60s. It was then that she took up running to keep in shape. She would run several days a week through Arlington National Cemetery. Later, when she had children she would take them to the track and let them play while she ran laps.
She also ran when she was just a kid growing up in the Chicago suburb of Lombard, IL. It was a safe, close-knit suburb where the children often ran freely around the neighborhood. For Margie running just came naturally. She was fast.

“I always noticed I was keeping up with the boys,” she says. “Only a boy named Phillip in my class could keep up with me. But suddenly, in junior high everything changed.” The girls had separate gym classes from the boys. She remembers the gym class as more of a social hour than actual physical exercise. High school was not much different. The closest thing to competitive sport on offer to the girls was intramural basketball.“We were content to watch the boys be the athletes,” Margie remembers.

College was slightly better; there were tennis and field hockey teams for the girls. Even though Margie does enjoy playing tennis, she says, “I was a coward. I thought that I wouldn’t be good enough since I had never had much experience (with organized sports).”

Although it came too late for Margie, in 1972 the U.S. Congress passed Title IX. This revolutionary piece of legislation changed the face of sport across the nation by mandating that females receive equal access to athletics in all educational settings. Even though Margie was no longer in school and was unable to take advantage of the new opportunities afforded to women.“I went out to the state cross country meet last [fall] and got tears in my eyes watching the girls run,” Margie says, “it (girls’ cross country) was not around when I was growing up.”

Margie now takes full advantage of the running scene. She often places in the top 20 percent of finishers, both male and female, and at the head of the pack of masters and grandmasters runners. In the March 2007 edition of Running Times magazine, she was ranked as the nation’s third best female road runner in the 65-69 age category.

Margie may regret waiting to fulfill her passion at age 60, but she is glad she was able to discover this hidden talent.
“Today’s women have more passion,” she says, “something I didn’t have until I turned 60.”

Since pinning on a number for the first time, running has gone from being an anti-aging activity to being a consuming passion for Margie. But, why start racing at the age of 60? And how did she go from rookie to national champion in five short years?
Her advice to young women today: “Don’t wait until you’re 60 to follow your passions. Start now.”

After Margie’s first race, she was quickly hooked, and she entered another. Then one day, not long afterwards, her husband, Hans, a professor at Vanderbilt’s Owen Business School, was cycling with a friend. They began talking about their spouses. Hans learned that his friend’s wife, also a runner, had enlisted the help of a coach. When he got home later that day, Hans told Margie about the coach.
Soon after, Margie found herself stopping by the front desk of the Green Hills YMCA, to meet with Bob Lundsford who, at the time, was the senior wellness director.
“I told him my story,” Margie says of her first meeting with Bob. “He didn’t really take many (new runners).”

But Bob thought it would be an interesting challenge to “take on” a 60-year-old female runner who was just entering the road racing and track scene.
The schedule was relatively light, but it worked wonders for Margie. Bob had her running four miles on Monday, cross-training at the YMCA on Tuesday, and running four 1-mile repeats (at a 7:20 clip) at the track on Wednesday. On Thursday through Sunday her schedule would vary depending on her weekend racing schedule.
“It was always the same,” she says of Bob’s training schedule, “take two days off before a race and one day after. He was very concerned about rest, especially at my age.”

This approach yielded some fine results, including Margie’s first single-age state road record on October 19, 2002 in Lebanon, a mere 16 months after her very first race.

It was a day she will never forget. Margie knew the record she had to beat before she ran the 5K. Margie remembers the day with excitement and wonderment. She would not only be battling for a record, she would have to fight the elements too. “It was a cold and rainy day, but I was going for it … it (her record breaking time) was only by a few seconds.”

Her time was 22:46 (7:20 pace). She accomplished her goal, but the realization sank in only when another runner congratulated her repeatedly. She had earned her first state road record! A record that still stands. An exhausted Margie went home and went to bed; but not before she set aside her race number to be framed and hung on the wall in her home office. Since that race in Lebanon she has added 26 more single-age state road records to her collection.

But in the midst of her newfound racing success, the new world she had entered was turned upside down. Bob Lundsford had a massive heart attack on Belle Meade Boulevard after he completing a bike ride on Tuesday, July 29, 2003. He was 53.
Margie learned of the news after returning home from a race in east Tennessee. She drove home alone after the race. Hans waited until she arrived safely home to break the news.

Margie was heart-broken. “He really was a special guy,” she says of Bob. “He really knew how to make everybody he talked to feel special. I couldn’t believe this person who trained so many people took an interest in me.”

With Bob no longer coaching her, Margie, at 62, needed to keep her focus. She found that focus through Dave Milner, her current coach. Dave coaches the Brentwood High School cross-country and track teams, and also advises adult marathoners online.

Dave was excited at the prospect of helping Margie, but felt he had a lot to live up to. “Bob was very knowledgeable and was a great runner,” Dave says. “I had some big shoes to fill.”

Dave wonders what kind of times Margie would have run had she competed in her twenties and thirties. Margie “really is amazing – one of the toughest athletes I have ever coached.”

Physiologically, basic speed becomes difficult to maintain as people age, according to Dave. “Women of Margie’s age tend to lose muscle mass each year,” Dave says. “To combat this, Margie does some kind of fast running at something close to her one mile race pace, almost every week – year-round.”

“It may be the core of the workout, or it may just be some fast 200s tacked on the end of a threshold-pace workout, but at Margie’s age it’s not just a cliché: you’ve got to use it or lose it.” Margie runs between 25 and 35 miles per week, with a weekly longrun of 8-12 miles and a weekly track workout at nearby Harpeth Hall High School.
At first glance Margie is a waif of a lady - diminutive in stature, quiet in nature, calm in the face of adversity. But you will find your assessment wrong if you only scratch the surface and don’t look beneath the skin.

Dallas Smith, a senior grandmasters runner and holder of several over-60 single-age state road records, knows Margie as a very competitive runner. “She is a quiet person by nature. She is quite calm and dignified as a lady, but she is a fierce competitor and demands respect on the race course.”

Dave sees her greatest asset as her mental toughness. “She really does give it 100 percent every time she races.” He recalls a 10K race she ran recently: “She was having an off-day, but still battled all the way. Right after crossing the finish line and having her timing chip removed, she walked over to the infield and lost her breakfast.
“How many women in their sixties will run until they puke?” he asks. “My high school kids were very impressed!”

And that is just how Margie tackles all aspects of life -- full force; with everything she has, until she gets to the finish line. That includes her battle with breast cancer while in her early 40s. Margie may have faced, fought, and beat breast cancer, but she does not consider herself a survivor or a hero. She considers those who have won the battle against breast cancer as veterans.

“The women who did not survive are the real heroes,” she says. “We veterans were just lucky enough to discover the lump early and to have been treated promptly.
“Why am I one of the lucky ones?” It’s a question she poses to no one in particular, but it lingers, unanswered. Even though we know it takes more than luck to survive breast cancer.Her memory takes her back to the day in 1982 when she was first diagnosed. In those days, breast cancer was “hush, hush,” Margie says, “it just wasn’t openly discussed, especially in mixed company.”

She and her family had just moved to Nashville two years earlier. Her children were only six, eight, and 11 years old when the diagnosis was delivered.
“I didn’t have many good friends to share my concerns with. I felt that I was asking for sympathy if I brought it up.”

Margie’s positive attitude, along with her family’s support, got her through that first breast exam, the lump, the first indication something was wrong.
“We didn’t know if it was benign or cancerous,” recalls Hans. “but once we knew, it was all traumatic: the diagnosis, the mastectomy, the surgery, the hair loss. But she fought the battle and survived. She handled it with great strength.”

Each year the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation holds its Race for the Cure in cities all across the country. In 2006, just as she had the previous two years, Margie was the first “survivor” to cross the finish line in the Nashville edition of the race. She covered the 5K course at Bicentennial Mall in just 22:58. “I’ve had tears in my eyes each year I’ve received the award,” she says.

By not openly talking about her breast cancer, Margie believes she has somehow failed her fellow ‘veterans’ -- daughters, sisters, mothers, grandmothers, and those who have yet to be diagnosed. “I see what a coward I was each year as I do the Race for the Cure and see the swarms of women, both young and old, proclaiming their support of fighting breast cancer,” Margie says. But she was no coward. She fought cancer, and won, using the same spirit she carries with her each time she steps up to the starting line of a race; the same dogged determination she uses as she pounds out the next step. She won.

As important as her running is, it is by no means her only passion. When she’s not working out, you can find her her harvesting her prized hydrangeas. Each year Margie grows hundreds of hydrangeas. She harvests them, and she sells fresh and dried hydrangeas to flower shops. She says she would like to be considered the “Johnny Appleseed of hydrangeas.” If she’s not training or in the garden, she’s visiting her granddaughter, writing, attending social functions with Hans, playing tennis, or following the fortunes of her beloved Chicago White Sox. Ask her how the Sox did any season in the past four decades, and she’ll bombard you with stats.Ask her about hydrangeas, and you’ll discover yourself planting a few of your own in the garden.

“When she does something,” Hans says of his wife, “she does it full-tilt, and she does it right. What you see is what you get. She straightforward, enthusiastic about what she does, and she’s a bundle of energy, always with a positive attitude.”
Of Hans, Margie says, not only is he supportive, “he is downright indulgent. Twenty-five years ago, when three little toddlers were underfoot, I don’t think I would have been able to say that of him. But now, not only does he put up with the way-too-early buzz of the Saturday morningalarm, but he allows me to talk on and on about my little successes. It makes for god dinner conversation... at least I think so.”

TR CONTRIBUTOR JEANNINE RENFRO is a Goodlettsville-based runner and writer who has duked it out with Margie on several occasions this year.