At bib pickup for a small-town half marathon, the line stalls in front of a man in his sixties. He’s wearing a tank top from a 1991 city fun run, washed so many times that the sponsor on the chest has faded to a shadow, and on his feet a pair of shoes released this year. He signs the waiver without reading it, with the hand of someone who has filled out that form more times than he could count, takes his safety pins, and heads for the start with short, loose strides. Nobody turns to look. He’s one of many, and he has been since I was in grade school.
Come to think of it, that man belongs to a category we still haven’t learned to name.
The Ones Who Were Already Running
Anyone turning sixty right now was born in the mid-sixties. They had just come of age when Italy’s Orlando Pizzolato won the New York City Marathon, and they were about twenty-two when Gelindo Bordin took Olympic gold in Seoul. Running landed on them along with a driver’s license and a first paycheck: Sunday-morning fun runs, nylon tracksuits that swished with every step, newsstand magazines printing marathon plans like recipes. The first boom, the one born in America in the seventies, had already traveled the world and left something quieter and more durable in its wake. A practice you could simply have, the way you have the habit of picking up the morning paper.
We know another story well, the late convert’s. The fifty-year-old who, after a checkup gone wrong or a divorce, buys a pair of shoes and discovers running the way you discover a second life, with the first three miles and the tears at the finish of a first half. It’s a true story, and it has its dignity, but it has often taken up all the room. For many of the sixty-year-olds running today, running was never a late discovery: it’s the habit of an entire life, started before their first job and carried through everything else. They have no memory of the day they began, any more than of the day they learned to ride a bike.
In the United States, someone has started counting them. I take those numbers for what they are: American context, which stays American. At the 2025 New York City Marathon, finishers over sixty were up 88% from ten years earlier, growth that keeps pace with runners in their twenties, as Sportico reports. On Boston’s 2026 entry list, the 60–64 age group grew by about a quarter in twelve months while every group between 35 and 59 lost ground; the rules play a part there too, since qualifying times held steady for runners over sixty and got tougher for younger ones, as the Running with Rock analysis points out. For Italy, numbers like these don’t exist. How many sixty-year-olds here have been running for forty years, none of us knows, and I won’t be the one to make it up. What I can do is recognize them, by how calmly they wait for the gun.
Growing Old Inside a Practice
From the outside, you can’t see the difference. Someone who starts at sixty learns to run with the body they have at that moment. Someone who grows old running lives the opposite motion: the body is what changes, inside a run that stays the same.
I’ve been running for about twenty years, long enough to sense how it works. On my usual loop there’s a hill, not much more than an overpass, that I hit at nearly the same point in every run. That hill hasn’t changed by an inch, and it has become my measuring stick. There were years I took it on momentum without noticing, then years I could feel it coming from the intersection before, and for a few winters now it’s the place where my breathing tells me things the mirror doesn’t show yet. It works like the pencil marks on a doorframe where parents track their kids’ height — except here the marks go down.
Multiply that hill by forty years and you start to understand what growing old inside a practice means. Jobs and cities change along the way, children are born and parents leave. The Saturday-morning run stays, and its permanence makes everything that moved around it legible. For a sixty-year-old who has always run, running matters more as a thread than as performance: the one activity that crosses every version of yourself without a break, from the twenty-year-old kid to the man whose knee creaks on damp mornings.
The body, for its part, holds on to something. The stride shortens, the flight phase drops until it nearly disappears, and yet the way of carrying the arms and the rhythm of the breath, two footfalls in and two out, are still the ones learned as a kid. They’re like the path that forms across a field from people walking it over and over: nobody ever designed it, yet the foot finds it even in the dark.
The Times Get Longer
I remember clearly the first year my 10K (6.2 miles) got slower for no reason. No injury, no break, the same training as the season before, and at the end a higher number on the display. I hunted for an explanation for weeks, the heat, the sleep, before accepting the most obvious one. I was a year older.
Anyone who is sixty and has been running for forty years has known that feeling so long it no longer resembles grief. Times stretch out year after year, a little at a time, with an almost geological regularity, and the PR set at thirty-two has become a historical document, a photo you look at fondly with no plan to repeat it. At that point the relationship with the clock changes in kind. The comparison shifts to yourself a year ago, the same race in the same season, or to those age-grading tables that let a sixty-year-old know what their 1:50 is worth next to a thirty-year-old’s 1:25.
Seen from inside a life of running, that higher number says something else too. It says that this year, once again, you made it to the end, and the streak is still intact. Every extra minute carries one more year of winters run in tights and Saturdays with the alarm set for the same hour.
Your times get longer because they hold more.
I don’t write that to console anyone. You can read it in the posture of runners past sixty waiting for the start in the middle of the corral: no rush to gain positions, the watch started with an absent-minded tap, eyes looking for familiar faces more than for the inflatable mile marker.
An Age Running Culture Won’t Look At
Scroll through any running shoe campaign and it’s clear who it’s talking to. Bodies between twenty and thirty in the low light of dawn, crews running in formation across a bridge and ending up at a café over oat-milk lattes, reels cut to the four-on-the-floor kick of some electronic track, not a wrinkle in close-up. The story of running that circulates today, across ads, run clubs, and social media, has picked an age and keeps repeating it. We’ve already seen that endurance races are run by forty-year-olds and photographed at a different age. For sixty-year-olds, the gap between who runs and who gets shown grows wider still.
When a sixty-year-old does enter the frame, it’s almost always as the exception. The eighty-year-old who finishes the marathon, the grandpa who outkicks the young guys at the line: stories told with affectionate amazement, applauded precisely because nobody saw them coming. That tone carries a specific idea — that aging and running stand on opposite banks, and every so often someone manages to hold them together by sheer willpower. The sixty-year-old who has always run has little that’s heroic to show, and that’s exactly why he stays out of every shot. He does his runs and crosses the line in the middle of the pack, with a time the announcer doesn’t call.
There’s a paradox in this absence, and it concerns whoever is doing the looking. The twenty-five-year-old running at dawn with their crew today, if they keep going — and many will, because people who take running seriously rarely give it up — will in thirty years be exactly that man in the middle of the pack. An imagery built only on young bodies leaves out more than today’s sixty-year-olds: it leaves out the future of the people consuming it. It treats running as a phase of life, while those who have practiced it for forty years prove every Saturday that it can span the whole arc.
If you’re reading this with your legs still warm from this morning’s run, those sixty-year-olds are the most reliable picture of your future that exists. Their pace, the one that looks slow from up at a thirty-year-old’s clip, is the pace you’ll have, if all goes well.
They’re thirty years ahead of you, and for once, being out in front means going slower.