Marathon Man

Whitlock currently holds thirteen Canadian track records, thirty-three Canadian age-class bests in road race events ranging from the mile to the marathon, and world age-class records for the 3,000 metres indoors, and 5,000 and 10,000 metres outdoors. However, his most significant achievement to date—the one that has made the reclusive and, at times, downright recalcitrant man into something of a media darling—came on September 26, 2004. That day, at the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon, Whitlock broke his own world record for men over seventy, covering the distance in 2:54:44. Whitlock is the only man over seventy to have run a marathon in under three hours, the unofficial dividing line between fit runners and the seriously fit. Non-runners may have trouble visualizing Ed Whitlock’s speed. Consider this: most of us over the age of, say, thirty could not run for more than 100 metres at the pace Ed Whitlock maintains throughout an entire marathon.

Ed Whitlock’s world marathon record for men seventy and over will likely stand for a long time. In the near future, it may only be broken by himself, as it appears that he is actually getting faster. The thought of Whitlock inspires other competitive runners to keep training despite the injuries that come with middle age. Whitlock swallows with difficulty and shifts in his seat when faced with this observation. “I’m not a person who is inspired by other people. Therefore, I have difficulty imagining that someone would be inspired by me.”

Organizers of the Rotterdam Marathon, one of the most elite races of its kind, have invited Whitlock to compete in their twenty-fifth anniversary race on April 10, 2005. He has accepted. Although it’s common for race organizers to bolster the prestige of their own events by inviting elite athletes and offering to pay their way, this marks the first time in the history of the Rotterdam Marathon that race organizers have invited an athlete at the master’s level (over forty) to one of their races.

“I am not an enthusiast of air travel. It’s not so much the plane I object to. It’s the airports,” he told me, hinting that the whole international travel ordeal will unfold for him at a pace torturously slow.

Whitlock may feel it ungentlemanly to carry on too much about his late-life running career. He refuses to speak about running in terms of his private dreams and passions, but suddenly reveals a glimpse of the tenacious obsession required to become the best in the world at his sport. He is chatting about the first time he set the over-seventy world record in the time of 2:59:08. It was at the 2003 Scotiabank Marathon in Toronto. Media interest in his story had been building prior to the race, and Whitlock concedes that he felt some pressure to become the first person over seventy to break the three-hour barrier for the marathon.

“It would have been a disgrace to run over three hours. An absolute disgrace,” he says.

In Whitlock’s own mind, it may well have seemed a disaster if he had failed to break the world record that day. But outside the academy of runners, Canadians, on the whole, didn’t know about the world record attempt, or care about the result. They wouldn’t have felt more than a speck of the passion they seem to display, once every four years, when Canadian athletes take to the Olympic track. The only reason that Ed Whitlock is not as familiar to Canadians as Donovan Bailey or Perdita Felicien is that he became a world-record-holding runner when many think older people should be settling into lawn bowling or, worse, giving up entirely and waiting for the end.

Whitlock, for one, doesn’t seem fazed by the ageing process. “As far as I’m concerned, I intend to keep running until something stops me.” For now, Ed Whitlock will keep training for Rotterdam by circling his lonely cemetery.