It’s unusual to meet a runner who’s been running for over 40 years, and it’s particularly unusual for that runner to be a woman. The RunBritain rankings website lists 31,600 active runners aged 60 and over, but only 28% of them are women. There has been a significant...
Interviews with women runners over 50 articles
Nikki Love
Nikki Love is a 50-year old runner from Nottingham who loves adventure. Her motto is “chasing extraordinary” and this encapsulates her drive to set herself challenging goals, and her desire to encourage others to become active and discover their own physical and...
Pathways into long-distance running
Women over fifty are not often in the public eye, and we don't know much about older women's experience of participating in sport or their attitudes to exercise. Through interviewing women runners for my blog I want to share and give value to their stories. For the...
Christine Heaton
I met Christine Heaton when I joined Holme Pierrepont Running Club five years ago. I soon realised that Christine was a fast runner. And it seemed she was getting faster. In 2015 at the age of 50 Christine ran a sub-20 minute parkrun (5 km), a time which placed her in...
Madeleine Wells
In February this year the parkrun organisation reported that over 50s had run 2 million miles at UK parkruns in 2015. Their data show that parkrun is encouraging people over 50 to become more active, and it is helping people of all ages to start running. It was at...
Karen Parkin
Did your life change at 50? Karen Parkin started running shortly after her 50th birthday and says, “It’s the best thing I ever did.” The data from Sport England’s Active People Survey suggest that Karen is not alone in taking up running in her fifties. In the nine...
Sandy Poole
As a runner in my fifties, who hopes to carry on running into old age, what can I learn from women who have continued to run through their fifties, and into their sixties and seventies? There are very few women over 64 running in the UK. According to the latest Sport...