Joan Benoit Samuelson: First Lady of the Olympic Marathon

On a cool, bright, April morning in 2008, my wife Sandi and I descend a rusty ladder to a float on the Peaks Island wharf, start the engine, and point our 16-foot boat towards Portland. From there, we’ll drive to Boston to cheer on 50-year-old Joan Benoit Samuelson at the United States Olympic marathon trials. Yes, you read that correctly: Age 50.

Maine is Joan Benoit Samuelson country. On Cliff Island, seven miles out to sea from Peaks Island, where her family owns a summer cottage, islanders are accustomed to seeing her on morning runs. With her efficient, effortless stride, she moves swiftly and silently along the dirt roads and inland trails, usually alone. Blink, and she’s gone.

In a story by the Bangor News leading up to the 2008 trials, Benoit acknowledged that at age 50, she was not favored to finish in the top three to represent the United States at the upcoming Beijing Olympics. “I run maybe a dozen races a year. I’m slow, not fast. I used to plan my day around running. Now I plan running around my day.”

Make no mistake, today she is planning on running fast.

In Boston, we meet up with Mike Roche, a high-school cross-country teammate of mine and a talented 3000-meter steeplechase runner. At the 1976 US Olympic trials Roche was in third place only 70 meters from the finish line when he tripped and fell on the last hurdle, breaking his wrist. Tumbling to the track he fell back to fourth place but regained his footing and repassed another athlete at the line to retake third place, and a spot on the US team at the Montreal Olympics. His gritty comeback made national news and his cast was signed by then President Gerald Ford.

Mike notices that I’m limping and I admit that I’m looking at another foot surgery. Most of our peers who ran or played football or soccer in high school and college are spectators now, not competitors. It’s unsaid, but we’re envious of Joan. Okay, maybe even jealous. Remarkably, some of the women in the marathon today are half her age.

The three of us find a spot several miles into the unique 4-lap marathon course (each lap is roughly six and a half miles).  Only a handful of the women in the race has a legitimate chance to make the team, for the rest, racing in the Olympic Trials is a capstone to an elite running career. Here they come. Bunched together on the first lap, the women surge past in a whir of pumping arms and legs so close together, we miss Joan.

My mind drifted back to a generation ago, when Joan Benoit Samuelson won the Boston Marathon at age 26 in a time of 2:22:43, establishing a new world record. Leading up to the 1984 Olympic Games, there was unprecedented interest in the women’s marathon. Although Benoit Samuelson held the world record for the event, there was uncertainty regarding her fitness; she had undergone arthroscopic surgery on her right knee only four months before the race.

The greatest women’s field ever assembled, including Grete Weitz of Norway (who had won nearly every head-to-head competition with Benoit) toed the starting line on a warm, humid day in Los Angeles. At the gun, the pack settled into a comfortable pace with Benoit Samuelson looking loose and relaxed. Unexpectedly, at the three-mile mark, she broke from the pack and surged into the lead. And didn’t look back. The lead grew from 50 to 100 to 300 yards. Grete Weitz and the other elite marathoners bided their time and expected her to fade.

But that was a generation ago. Today, as the lead pack streams by for a second time, we wait patiently, scanning the competitors for Our-Lady-From-Maine. Finally, we spot Joan. She is not in last place, but nearly so. She looks every bit of 50 years old. Compared to the other runners, her stride looks choppy, perhaps even ungraceful. We cheer and I remind myself it’s remarkable she even qualified for the trials. These are the best of America’s best. Two laps to go.

Quietly, I wonder if she might drop out.

Twenty miles into the inaugural Olympic women’s marathon in 1984, Joan Benoit Samuelson was nearly two minutes ahead of the field. Greta Weitz desperately picked up her pace in an attempt to close the gap, but it was too little and too late. In one of the Olympic games most iconic moments, Benoit Samuelson entered the Los Angeles coliseum alone, and circling the track, crossed the line in a time of 2:24:52, forever changing the public’s perception of women’s distance athletes.

Mike Roche shouts, “Here they come again!” The pack streams by for the third time at the Boston Olympic trials race, the leaders remain the same, but some of the runners are losing form, their arms swinging across their body, their heads lolling side-to-side.  In the excitement of the race, some of the elite but less experienced runners have run the first half too fast and are now paying the price. We look down the long straight-away and here comes Joan. With her efficient, effortless stride, she moves swiftly and silently our way. She is 26-years-old again on the dirt roads of Cliff Island. There’s a long line of racers trailing behind her. Her stride looks absolutely beautiful. Blink, and she’s gone.

Waiting for the leaders to appear for the fourth and final lap, it comes to me: The race we’re watching today is every bit as remarkable as Benoit’s Olympic triumph in 1984. If her victory in the first women’s marathon inspired an entire generation of women distance runners, then today’s race is a master lesson in life-long fitness for older runners, like me.

We hear the applause for Joan Benoit Samuelson well before she comes into view on her last lap, a rolling wave of love and respect for the ultimate competitor. She’s on a roll now. As she nears, the applause is deafening. Mike Roche points out another fellow Olympian, Frank Shorter, standing a few feet away from us. Shorter, like Benoit-Samuelson, also broke decisively away from the field on his way to a gold medal in the 1972 Olympic marathon. We are nearly close enough to touch Benoit Samuelson’s singlet when he edges into the road, and, overcome with emotion, cups his hands, and inexplicably shouts, “Marry me, Joanie!!”

Years later, neither Mike Roche nor my wife Sandi can recall Shorter’s proposal. And it’s possible that the din of the crowd, the fluid beauty of the moment, may have altered my memory of what he shouted. But I do clearly remember Benoit Samuelson’s face turning ever so slightly towards Shorter in recognition, her concentration broken for a moment, her mouth curling in a half-smile. In a moment, she was gone, only her back visible as she strained to catch the next runner. And the next.

In an interview with the New York Times’ Frank Litsky following the 2008 race, Benoit Samuelson stated that this would be her final Olympic trials, but maybe not her final marathon. “I never say never…I have friends and family members who might want to run a marathon someday, and I might run with them. So, I will run another marathon, I’m sure, but it won’t be at this level.”

And of course, she may have meant it at the time, but there she was toeing the line at the Boston Marathon at age 53, attempting to qualify for the 2012 US Olympic trials marathon. She failed to qualify for the Olympic trials, but won her age group nearly 30 years after her world record run in Boston.

But the urge to test her fitness, to compete into her 50’s and 60’s, remained intact, even as her marathon times slowed. One physiologic advantage was her unusually high VO2 max (the maximum amount of oxygen the body is able to use while exercising at high intensity), at 78.6, among the highest ever recorded for a woman. This allowed Benoit Samuelson to maintain a race pace at a lower percentage of her maximum effort than other competitors. Some of this advantage is genetic; researchers have discovered that between half and two-thirds of VO2 max is determined by a handful of genes, but the remainder can be improved with consistent training and running efficiency.

Benoit Samuelson’s racing success and longevity may also rely on a trait that is difficult, if not impossible to quantify: grit. Individuals with “grit” have a passion and perseverance towards a goal. Angela Duckworth, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, describes grit as “firmness of character; indomitable spirit.” Teddy Roosevelt associated grit with courage and resilience In the Finnish language, the word sisu may come closest to the essence of grit, a mystical blend of stoic resilience and hardiness. However one defines grit, it has defined Benoit Samuelson’s race success.

In an interview for Yankee magazine in 2016, she touched on her simple strategies for race fitness and her longevity in the sport. One was her long-term commitment to remain in Maine. “I believe you can gain a lot more strength from adapting to different seasons than you can from going back and forth from different altitudes.…I can count the number of times I’ve run on a treadmill on two hands.” And speaking of Maine winters: “I don’t like looking at the thermometer before I go out the door. I can always peel a layer off and leave it on somebody’s mailbox and pick it up on the way back.”

As a nod to her age, she admitted that she did more cross-training and now included yoga, cycling, and both Nordic and downhill skiing with her husband Scott and son, Anders, in the winter. Tellingly, she included summer gardening as a form of cross-training. Perhaps repetitive scooching is her secret potion.

In fact, it would seem that everything is Joan Benoit’s secret potion. In the same Yankee Magazine interview, she said that part of her long-term success was her parents’ example of trying to live as balanced a life as possible. Note that the goal is not to live a balanced life. The secret is in the trying. When life inevitably gets out of kilter, when a race (or job) takes precedence over family life, or there are not enough minutes in a day to be everything to everyone, it’s time to reflect, simplify, and rebalance. This, perhaps, is Joan Benoit Samuelson’s ultimate secret to her remarkable running longevity: Slow down to run fast. Listen to your body. Focus on being healthy.

In the summer of 2021, I traveled to Cliff Island (year-round population 70) from my home on Peaks Island for a book talk. My daughter Molly is friends with Joan’s daughter, Abby, and I had met Joan several times over the years. After the book discussion, Molly and I stopped by the Benoit Samuelson’s before boating home. On the walk to her home, time slowed down. I noticed a patch of showy goldenrod, a rarity in Maine, blooming in an open field. In the inner harbor, a half-dozen lobster boats bobbed on anchor. Near shore, a creche of female eiders cooed a soft warning to their fledglings as an osprey dove on a nearby school of pogy.

On the porch of the family cottage, there was Joan Benoit Samuelson balancing her 4-month-old granddaughter, Charlotte, on one knee. She handed Charlotte to Abby who placed her on a blanket on the floor. I’m aware that only 2 years before, at age 62, Joan had narrowly missed breaking 3 hours in the Berlin marathon. Incredibly, she was already the only woman in history to break 3 hours in the marathon in her teens, 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, and 50’s. Adding up her decades of training, she estimated that she had run 150,000 miles. I wondered, was she still running? In reply, Joan flexed her right knee and massaged a recent scar. “I’ve had a knee replacement.”

“How are you progressing?”

“It was a partial. They replaced the outer right side, the side that was completely worn down. It’s slow, but I’m on the mend.” There was a twinkle in her eye. What she left unsaid was this: The right knee was operated on in 1984, only a few months before she won the first women’s Olympic Marathon in Los Angeles.

As a physician I knew that it was unusual for a patient to have a partial knee replacement in their 60’s. It’s a surgery performed most often after trauma in patients too young for a total knee replacement. The recovery is slow and painful, but the upside is that some patients are able to return to a higher level of activity after a partial knee replacement than with a total knee replacement.

Patients who undergo knee replacement are usually content to walk without a limp or perhaps play a round of golf. Joan Benoit Samuelson is not your usual patient. I watched carefully for a sign of a limp as she stood and walked to the sink, took a sip from her coffee cup, and gazed out the window at her garden. There it was again, that twinkle in her eye. “I’ve gotten the okay to start running.”

I noted that she did not say “jog.” Behind that twinkle in her eye was a goal. She intended to run, to train, to compete again. On October 1st 2022, Joan Benoit Samuelson won her age group at the London Marathon, finishing the course in 3:20:20, her first marathon since Berlin 2019. She was 65 years old. In an interview with race organizers following the race, she said, “…I did it today for my daughter Abby, who was also racing, which was a real pleasure. I am a grandmother now to Charlotte, and it’s my goal to run a 5k with her.”

The next summer I returned to Cliff Island and we chatted about grandchildren and gardening.  We snacked on homemade pie. She wanted me to know that she was having second thoughts about her goal of running a 5k race with Charlotte. For a long moment, she gazed quietly across the harbor with that curious half-smile of hers before saying, “Charlotte’s freedom to choose her own goals, her own story, is more important than my dream of having three generations compete in the same race. I hope she can focus on just being healthy.”

And perhaps that’s the ultimate secret potion, the key behind Joan Benoit Samuelson’s remarkable life: Goal setting. Balance. Reflection. Family. And of course, grit. There she goes, out the door for another run, 150,000 miles and counting.