At 79 years old, Florence Barron can beat most NFL players in a race. A 10-mile race, that is.
She ran the distance on Sunday in 1 hour, 27 minutes and 19 seconds to set a new age group record at the Tely 10-Miler, an annual race in Newfoundland.
Those are 8:44 min/miles, for those of you wondering. Of the 4,340 finishers, she placed 1,013th overall, and beat out 89% of the women in the field.
79-year-old Florence Barron beats 89 per cent of @Tely10NL-Miler women’s field #Tely10 https://t.co/Qcm6QeVou8 pic.twitter.com/hydksmu7zw
— CanadianRunning (@CanadianRunning) July 25, 2017
According to Canadian Running, Barron trained incredibly hard for this one, her 19th year running the race, to break her own record of 1 hour, 29 minutes and 56 seconds.
Next year, she’ll move into a new age group (80-84), where the record is 2 hours, 23 minutes and 49 seconds. You can bet she’ll smoke that time, too.
Barron has kept active throughout her life, participating in swimming, cross-country skiing and aerobics while she worked as a nursing assistant and raised five children. Then when she and her husband retired in 1997, she took up running after signing up for the Tely 10-Miler on a whim.
Now, the sport is her fuel.
“I say it’s like taking a pill, it just gives you a nice feeling,” Barron told CBC News in 2015. “I’m always happy on a run. When I feel a bit stressed or not feeling so great, I just grab my shoes and go for a nice long run.”
“A nice long run.” Four words that would never come out of the mouths of most people half her age.
