By Andrea Hillrista DuChene doesn’t believe in
setting limits based on numbers.
So when the Olympic marathoner
turned 40 two years ago and became a
masters athlete, nothing changed. She
continued to log huge miles and clock
some of the fastest times in the country
over 42.2 kilometres.
“It was just another number,” says
DuChene, who’s now 42. “It didn’t
bother me at all.”
Since turning 40, DuChene has
battled wind and rain to place third
overall in the 2018 Boston Marathon
and ran sub-2:40 at both the Scotiabank
Toronto Waterfront Marathon last fall
and the Tamarack Ottawa Marathon
this spring to finish among the top-
three Canadian women.
Even as a masters runner, DuChene
is among the best in the country and
isn’t afraid to say she’s hoping to earn
a place on Team Canada for the 2020
Olympic Games in Tokyo.
DuChene says she doesn’t know ifshe’ll ever better her marathon personal
best of 2:28, which she set when she
was 36. But she believes aging – and
the experience that comes with it – can
give her an edge in the marathon, where
mental strength plays such a huge part.
“When you’re my age and you’ve
been running this many marathons,
you’ve likely had other life experiences
that you can draw upon to make you a
strong runner,” says DuChene, who’s
finished 18 marathons in 17 years.
“Having done it for so long, you
know what to expect. It never becomes
easy to run a marathon, but I think it’s
just a matter of drawing on those past
experiences.”
DuChene’s coach, Dave Scott-Thomas,
says it’s “extremely uncommon” for
athletes in their 40s to be selected for
national teams. Yet he believes making
the 2020 Olympic team is “absolutely”
a possibility not only for DuChene, but
also for another of his masters athletes,
two-time Olympic marathoner Reid
Coolsaet, who turned 40 this summer.
“It’s realistic that there is some
decline in performance as you get older,
but we don’t know how steep that is,”
Scott-Thomas says.
“At no point do we just sort of say,
‘well, you can’t run fast anymore
because you’re 40.’”
Scott-Thomas says years of running
marathons and accumulating life
experience is a huge advantage for his
masters athletes. By now, DuChene
and Coolsaet are “essentially unf lap-
pable” and able to adapt when races or
training runs don’t go as planned.
“ That allows you to save so much
emotional energy by having that
perspective on life,” Scott-Thomas
says. “ That’s not just their experience
with running, it is being parents, it is
having jobs, it is just going through
the vicissitudes of being an adult and
having things happen to you.”
A 2017 study that analyzed the times
of top age-group finishers at the Boston,“When you’re my
age and you’ve been
running this many
marathons, you’ve
likely had other
life experiences
that you can draw
upon to make you
a strong runner.”
—Krista DuChene, 3rd overall female,
2018 Boston MarathonCanada’s elite middle-aged marathon runners
aren’t letting age slow them down
MASTER CLASS
K
OPPOSITE
Krista DuChene
racing the
Boston
Marathon in
the wind and
rain on her way
to third place
on the podium42 Canadian Running September & October 2019, Volume 12, Issue 6
Jess^ Baumung