A college cross-country team needed runners. It recruited three moms over 40.
By Jacob Bogage Washington Post editor
September 19 at 6:32 AM
It all began with a desperate need for runners, any runners. The qualifications were rather broad.
It was April, months since Daytona State College started a cross-country team. Judy Wilson, hired as both the men's and women's coach, had recruited male runners first. She figured that'd be harder: finding guys who wanted to compete for a junior college, with a female coach, in its inaugural season.
But now, Daytona State needed to fill out its women's team, and Wilson was struggling. She joked to members of her weekend running club, "You can join! There's no age limit!" Some of the faster club members, she noted, could even match the times of junior college runners.
"I fit into the pace," said Bego Lopez, soon to turn 50. "Recruit me!"
So Wilson did. And then she found two more runners in their 40s. They filled out the Falcons' women's roster heading into the fall National Junior College Athletic Association season. And sure enough, the three older runners, ages 50, 49 and 42, are among the team's fastest.
In the season's first meet, Kris Gray, then 48, was the Falcons' top finisher in the women's 5-kilometer race with a time of 22 minutes 2 seconds. In the second meet, Lopez finished second overall in the 3K with a 12:16 time. Gray was fourth with 12:20.
"Judy was right," Lopez said. "I wasn't at the back of the pack."
Daytona State Athletic Director William Dunne has been at the college 30 years. He said he's never seen one program make a habit of recruiting "nontraditional students."
"Our rules are different than NCAA rules. If we offer activities ... students and members of our community are interested in, and they're eligible, why not?" he said. "It's a neat thing where maybe a nontraditional student can participate."
Wilson found Gray, a former triathloner, after Lopez. She was running with a mutual friend who mentioned Daytona State was looking for runners. All you had to do was enroll in a semester's worth of classes — you could even take them online — and keep up with the rest of the team.
"I thought it would be exciting," Gray said. "It's easier to get better when you're in a group."
She arrived at the first practice to find not only runners her daughter's age, but ones her daughter actually ran with on her high school varsity team. Gray was the mom who threw pasta parties the night before races and braided hair on race day.
"I was worried it'd be uncomfortable to have a mom figure on the team, but it's worked out," she said.
"I didn't know if we would fit in with them because we're 20 years older," said Jenny Eslin, 42, the final nontraditional recruit. "But it was really nice. At the end of the meet, one of the younger girls asked if next week we could go get our nails done together."
Wilson had contacted Eslin after she saw they both ran the Boston Marathon and realized they had mutual friends.
"When she first reached out, I thought she wanted volunteers to help with the team, like an assistant," Eslin said. "It was kind of mind boggling that she wanted older runners to be on the team."
But Wilson doesn't treat the nontraditional athletes any differently than the 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds on the roster. She runs Division I-style workouts, the same ones she ran during previous coaching stints at Indiana, DePauw, Connecticut and South Florida.
She uses Lopez, Gray and Eslin to motivate the younger runners. If they can complete these workouts and make these times in their 40s and 50s, a recent high school graduate can make it, too.
One runner turned to Lopez during a practice and told her, "Ms. Bego, I hope I look like you when I'm 50."
It's just "Bego," Lopez told her. We're teammates.
"And your goal is to beat us," said Lopez, who is using her semester of credits to study chemical engineering. "At the end of next season, be faster than us. Beat us. I'm just gliding, because at a certain age, you don't expect to get much faster. But you can get faster."
The promising start to the cross-country program has made Wilson think again about the place of nontraditional athletes on her teams. When she ran in college at Indiana, a graduate student participated in the cross-country workouts with the team and helped Wilson make it through tougher days on track.
The Falcons' older athletes can do the same for the younger ones, she said, and those younger runners will build the program's foundation.
For now, though, it's a reminder to the older members of the team that they're never too old to try something new. And maybe, those runners can spark others to get in shape, or to rediscover a sport they once loved.
"There's no limit if you want to do something and want to try. All you have to do is have some personal commitment and push it," Lopez said. "It can happen."
"You have an athlete inside you. It's just up to you to bring it out," said Wilson.
Or, to go find a junior college cross-country team.