My guest today is Gene Dykes. Gene described himself as a “terrible runner” in college. As an adult his primary athletic outlets were golf and bowling, not running. He took 6 years completely off from running due to a hamstring injury in his 50s. Gene doesn’t do any stretching, cross training or strength work. Yet in spite of all of this, he is one of the top age group distance runners in the world. He recently became only the second runner over age 70 to break three hours in the marathon in 2018 when he ran 2:54 at the Jacksonville marathon, bettering the age group world record of the legendary Ed Whitlock. Despite being such an accomplished runner, Gene is extremely modest and tends to downplay his own results. Gene is primarily a marathoner and he also does lots of trail races and ultra marathons, including races over 200 miles.

But Gene does occasionally compete in shorter distances on the track. In fact, a classic example of Gene’s humility is when we spoke about his participation in the 2018 USATF Outdoor national championships. Gene mentioned that he did the 5K and 10K early in the meet. He didn’t even mention the fact that he easily won both of those races. 

Then he talked about racing the 1500, which he said was the hardest race he ever did both physically and mentally because he doesn’t train for that type of speed and distance. He mentioned that the race was a contrast in styles between him and Gary Patton, who holds the M70 WR for the indoor mile and that there was a cool YouTube video of the race. I actually didn’t realize until after the podcast when I looked up the results that Gene won that race. 

2018 USATF Masters Outdoor Nationals 1500 M70-74 race video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOyi5K5n97U

Gene’s coach – John Goldthorp:https://www.fixyourrun.com

Profile of Gene in Outside magazine:https://www.outsideonline.com/2394342/runner-gene-dykes

You can catch the latest episode of the podcast on iTunes so subscribe and leave a five-star review. We are also on Google Play,TuneIn and now Spotify!