The race wasn’t long, just 60 meters. The winner of this Masters (40 and over) event, held February 16 at Manhattan’s Armory, crossed the finish line in nine seconds. But it wasn’t the winner—a 40-year-old woman—that the handful of fans and other athletes had come to cheer.
Their applause was for a 4-foot-6, 83-pound sparrow of a woman named Ida Keeling. Keeling set a world age-group record for the 60-meter dash three years ago, when she was 92. It was later broken. Now, at 95, she was determined to win it back.
Keeling did not race in high school. She didn’t race in college. She didn’t run at all until she was 67. To tell the truth, she didn’t want to race then. But she needed something to recharge her life.
Keeling’s husband had died of a heart attack in 1958, when he was 42. In 1979 she lost one son to a homicide. Two years later, another son died the same way. Keeling’s blood pressure spiked dangerously high. Her daughter, Shelley Keeling, a lawyer who also serves as track and field coach at the Fieldston School in the Bronx, convinced her to enter a 5K race in Brooklyn.
“Even though I didn’t feel like going, when I went on that run, I started to feel better, like a flower beginning to open,” Keeler told the Riverdale Press. “By the time it was over, I felt great. I didn’t want to stop.”
She hasn’t. Keeling runs everywhere—on treadmills, in races, in the hallways of her apartment building in the Bronx.
That night in the Armory, everyone, including Shelley and several of Keeling’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren, stood to cheer her on. When she crossed the finish line, she raised her arms in victory. She had finished in 29.86 seconds, a new world record for the 95-and-older age group.
“I feel wonderful,” Keeling said.
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