Run Long After 60

Mark Vega
  • 5.0 (5)
  • Health & Fitness

Run Long After 60 is a podcast about durability, curiosity, and continuing to do hard things as the years stack up. Hosted by Mark Vega, the show features long-form conversations with runners, endurance athletes, coaches, creatives, and professionals who are still showing up — often well past the age when society expects people to slow down. This is not a podcast about speed, podiums, or shortcuts. It’s about adaptation. Perspective. And learning how to keep moving forward — physically, mentally, and creatively — over the long arc of a life. Episodes are often recorded in motion, including running intros captured mid-workout, because this show isn’t about talking around endurance. It’s about living it. Conversations explore training, aging, setbacks, reinvention, discipline, failure, resilience, and the quiet decisions that allow people to keep going long after others have stopped. Run Long After 60 is for anyone who believes that endurance doesn’t expire — it evolves. 🎙 New episodes weekly 📍 Hosted by Mark Vega

  1. 4d ago

    Episode 50 - David Miao | Started at 54, Won His First 100

    David Miao took up running at fifty-four, in Flushing, Queens, because he was putting on weight. He had never heard of a gel, a drop bag or a pacer. At his first marathon he picked a stranger who was aiming for three hours thirty-five and copied him exactly, stopping every time he stopped, even at water he didn't want. At the finish people kept telling him he killed it. He had no idea what they meant. His wife Karen came that day only to support him. It was the end of January and too cold to stand around for hours, so she ran the half marathon. She had never run a step. She hasn't stopped since. Less than two years later, in October 2020, David ran his first hundred-miler: ten loops of a ten-mile course in a Long Island forest, with no vest and no bottle. He won it outright. The next summer, at the Great New York 100, he ran in one-dollar socks while other runners laughed, and finished second in nineteen hours. He was the first member of his club, the Misty Mountain Runners, to run fifty miles and the first to run a hundred, he says, and the club has followed him to the start lines ever since. In 2022 he finished all four races of the Grand Slam of Ultrarunning, after discovering three races in that he had never registered for the last one, Wasatch. He emailed until they let him in, five days before the start. In 2023 he ran Cocodona, 250 miles across Arizona, with Karen pacing the last sixty. Five miles from the finish he ran ahead to break ninety hours, crossed the line, and ran straight back up the trail to bring her in. That September they ran UTMB around Mont Blanc, and nine days later started Tor des Géants: 330 kilometers through Italy's Aosta Valley with about 24,000 meters of climbing. Karen had won a lottery spot and David hadn't, so he paid double for a charity bib to run it beside her. They finished one second apart. A Chinese gear brand, Kailas Fuga, took him on after that. This year, at sixty-one, he has run Cocodona again with Karen, UTMB, Tor des Géants for a third time and, in October, The Mammoth 200. He tells Mark about the aid-station captain at The Mammoth who threw him out after six hours of sleep, the half-hour nap near the end of UTMB that he says cost him the lead in his age group, running the Bay Area 100 in nothing but shorts, and why Karen made him carry six liters of water up a mountain. He also gives Mark his honest take on the big race companies, UTMB, Aravaipa and Destination Trail: what each does well, and where the aid-station food could be better. He doesn't go to a gym. He barely sweats, so he barely drinks. And he has a simple case for anyone over sixty: get on the trails, build your balance and your ankles, and keep running so you keep the muscles you use. This is David's first podcast ever. He had never told these stories on a mic before, and we're grateful he said yes. For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

  2. Oct 25

    Episode 49 - Jill Hudson | Chasing 100 Hundred-Milers at 64

    When this conversation was recorded, Jill Hudson had finished 97 races of 100 miles or more. She is 64. She plans to finish the last two back to back, over New Year's, at the same race where she ran her first. Jill is a retired Seattle school principal. Her dad got the family running in the late 1970s, and she ran her first marathon at seventeen. She came back to running in her forties, after her daughter was born, and found the Marathon Maniacs: a marathon a month, then two, then more. She never liked long training runs, so the races became her training. She says she ran marathons as a middle school principal and ultras as a high school principal, and that the stress of the second job had something to do with it. Her first hundred was a 48-hour race at Across the Years in Arizona, New Year's 2011 into 2012. She finished with seven or eight blisters, went into a tent, and cried so hard people came to check on her. Then she went back out and walked extra laps for fun. Four years later she won the Across the Years 72-hour outright, men and women, with 204.7 miles. It took three tries. The year she finally got there, a six-day runner called her a rascal, and she added it to her mantra: I'm strong, I'm prepared, I'm a rascal who's got this. When young runners ask her for tips, she tells them the same two things: be positive, and have a mantra. Most of Jill's hundreds are fixed-time races. Runners loop a short course, often a mile or so, for a set time: 24 hours, 48, 72, six days. Whoever covers the most distance wins. Jill likes them because they're flat, social and fast, and because you see your friends every lap. She also tells Mark about the time she went off the flat stuff. She won a raffle entry into Western States, trained for months, and reached mile 90 before she timed out. That night a friend gave her a buckle he had made himself: a cat on its back with its legs in the air. It's one of the buckles she's proudest of. A few months later she ran her 100-mile PR, 23:08 at Hennepin. They talk about how her body has changed since 60: the gym she finally joined, the hand cramps that changed her fueling, decaf all year so caffeine still works at 3 AM. They talk about the races she started hosting when COVID shut everything down, which are small and cheap and known for pie. And she has advice for anyone close to 60 who thinks long running is behind them: find races with long cutoffs, walk when you need to, and find someone your pace to talk to. The plan for 99 and 100 is specific. Across the Years now offers a straight hundred-miler, so Jill will run the 48-hour starting December 28, rest a day, and start the 100 on the morning of New Year's Eve, when a lot of runners start so they can run through midnight. If it goes to plan, her hundredth hundred finishes on New Year's Day. For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

  3. Oct 11

    Episode 48 - Doug Lewis, 62 | Olympian, Ultrarunner, Beginner Again

    Forty years after he raced down the Streif at Kitzbuhel, Doug Lewis went back and ran up it. In August 2026, at sixty-two years old, Doug started the KAT100 by UTMB in Austria - nearly ninety-nine miles through the Kitzbuhel Alps with something close to twenty-eight thousand feet of climbing. A thunderstorm broke over the six o'clock start and the rain ran on for five hours into the night. Fifty-eight miles in, the course sent him up the Hahnenkamm, the mountain he had raced down in a speed suit as a twenty-two-year-old on the US Ski Team. He finished in a little over twenty-nine hours, twenty-third overall, and won the men's sixty to sixty-four category by more than thirteen hours. He is a two-time Olympian in the alpine downhill - Sarajevo in 1984, Calgary in 1988 - and at the 1985 World Championships in Bormio he became the first American man ever to win a World Championship medal in a speed event. He took two national downhill titles after that. He was five foot eight and a hundred and seventy-five pounds in a sport that rewards size, and he made the Streif, the most dangerous downhill in the world, work for him anyway. Then he retired at twenty-five and, in his own words, lost his identity. He went from Sports Illustrated to sitting in the back of an introductory economics class as a twenty-six-year-old freshman. What pulled him out was an offer to coach a group of ten- and eleven-year-olds, and that turned into ELITEAM, the conditioning camp he and his wife Kelley have run for thirty-five years. Two hundred and fifty burpees a day. Lights out at nine. As a ski racer he hated running. The team ran a two-mile fitness test every year and he scraped under the twelve-minute limit every year. Somewhere after he stopped racing, that turned into a question about how far he could go, and the answer has so far been nine hundred-mile finishes and no DNFs. Doug is the first person who ever found this show on his own and asked to be on it, and this conversation is the one he came for. He talks about going into the dark hole seven or nine or eleven times in a single race and the tools he uses to climb back out. He talks about winning the first Spartan Death Race in 2007 with a peanut butter sandwich and a knife in his pack, and having dinner beforehand with an unknown man named David Goggins. He talks about the night in Italy when he could not stand up straight for the last fifteen miles, and what Kelley said to him afterwards that changed how he saw it. He talks about being frightened - and about the one place he refused to let fear come with him. There is a quieter thread underneath it too. At sixty-two he has noticed his mobility going, and he is honest about not knowing whether that is age or neglect. He had a full blood workup and a cardiac scan this year because Kelley told him to, and he spends a few minutes asking everyone listening to do the same. He is sixty-two. He is looking for his tenth hundred-miler - around seventeen thousand feet of climbing, runnable, somewhere beautiful enough to stop and feel lucky - and he would like your suggestions. For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

  4. Oct 4

    Episode 47 - Jeff Stafford | The Last Annual Podcast Series Pt. 3, HOTS at 69

    He spent twenty-six years in the Army running two to four miles a day at somebody else's pace, and when he retired he decided he was finished with running for good. He sat on the couch for about a decade. He was fifty-six when he asked his wife to walk around the block with him. He started running ahead to the stop signs and jogging back to her. After a few weeks she told him to stop waiting and just go. Jeff Stafford is sixty-nine years old. This June he finished the Last Annual Heart of the South — three hundred fifty-five miles across the American South, eight days and two hours, fourth overall. He was the oldest finisher in the sixty-to-sixty-nine age group. Thirteen runners that age started the race. Six of them finished. The Heart of the South is Lazarus Lake's journey run. You leave your car in a field in Georgia, get on a bus, and nobody tells you where it's going. The route arrives on your phone the night before. Then you walk home. No aid stations, no crew, no pacers. You resupply at gas stations and Dollar Generals and you sleep where you can. Before any of that, Jeff flew helicopters. Fifteen years in UH-1 Hueys, then Little Birds with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, carrying Rangers and Delta and SEAL Team Six to places nobody talks about. He retired in 2001, two months before September eleventh. He is the best explanation this show has yet found for why so many of these runners come out of that world: the no-fail mission. Everything is training until suddenly it isn't, and then the only acceptable outcome is finishing. As he puts it, the DNFs that hurt are the ones where you failed yourself. Tim Hardy is back in the chair as guest co-host — the two of them met on the road at Vol State in 2019 and recognized each other as Army before either said so. They cover a lot of ground. The first hundred-miler, which came after a DNF at mile sixty-eight. Five Strolling Jims and three sub-seven shirts. Old Dominion with fourteen minutes to spare. Big Barkley in 2024. Why he prefers the Heart of the South to Vol State, and why he volunteers at Vol State anyway — taking finishers' photographs at the Rock and driving people who can't drive themselves up and down the mountain all night. And two stories from this June that don't sound like ultrarunning at all. The morning he crossed Atlanta on the MARTA train, exhausted, knowing nothing about public transit, and simply asked the first local he saw for help — while other runners in the same race lost six hours because they wouldn't. And the elderly man with the white beard and the one cloudy eye who nodded at him on that train, and then turned up again the next day, a hundred miles west, in a McDonald's. Near the end Mark makes him an argument. Jeff turns seventy shortly after the new year. Attrition thins the seventy-to-seventy-nine group to almost nothing, and Jeff hasn't slowed much. Those records are sitting there. Jeff's own goal is different, and he says it plainly: he wants to be the oldest person ever to officially start the Barkley Marathons. For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

  5. Sep 13

    Episode 46 - Lance “Coco” Griffiths | Elite Health for Elite Careers, Strong 64

    At ten years old, Lance Griffiths showered at the gym because there was no hot water at home. His father was a competitive bodybuilder who used coconut oil before every session, so the boy went to school smelling of coconuts and was bullied for it. The name they gave him was Coco. Fifty-four years later it is the only name anyone uses. He competed in the Mr. UK in 1990, decided the sport was not worth what it cost him, and left it for thirty years. Martial arts instead, where he won the national championships two years running and made the UK squad as first reserve. He built a business. His own fitness, by his account, went out of the window while he did it. What brought him back was somebody else. He began coaching a woman whose training partners and coaches had let her down, told her on the first day that she had far more potential than she believed, and watched her win her class, turn professional inside five months, and become one of the most decorated masters female bodybuilders in the country. He went to every competition as her bag carrier and her food prep. Eighteen months in, he started wondering whether he could still do it himself. Fourteen months after that he was in Campinas, Brazil, registered for two age groups at the same championship. He won the over-60s and came second in the over-50s. This June he went to the WABBA World Championship in Budapest and found himself the smallest man on stage by roughly fifteen kilos — completely outclassed, in his own words, wanting to run and hide. He competed anyway and finished sixth in the world. The way he broke that hour into pieces he could control is the most transferable thing he says all episode. Coco is a body transformation coach on the Isle of Wight, and his clients weigh every gram of food they eat. Mark, who started measuring his own food three weeks before this conversation, hands him the question directly: is measuring by cups instead of grams good enough? The answer, and the coaching that follows it, becomes the spine of the episode. They get into why a bodybuilder is not a strong man, why adding weight training improves results in any sport, and why the best workout is the one you can actually repeat. They get into three alarm clocks and the difference between motivation and discipline. They get into underfueling, and the clients who write to Coco astonished at how much food they are being told to eat. And when Mark asks whether his listeners will hear an instruction to weigh their food as shame or as punishment, Coco does not defend the practice. He compares the body to a car, and the question stops being personal. This is the first podcast Coco has ever appeared on. It is also, for a show about running long after sixty, the strength and nutrition conversation this audience has never had. For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

  6. Sep 6

    Episode 45 - Andy Mathews | 444 Florida Miles, 314 Tennessee Miles, Long Haul RD, Community Man

    Andy Croom Mathews is a Florida history teacher who became a race director almost by accident and an ultrarunner almost by eavesdropping. In 2001, at 39, he overheard two men in their fifties talking about something called the Vermont 100. His thought was simple: if these guys can do it, I can do it. He mailed in a paper application with a check, flew to New Hampshire without arranging a ride to the start, packed his drop bags in the wrong order, and finished in twenty-three hours and eight minutes. He had to ask the race director whether he'd broken twenty-four, because his watch had died. Twenty-five years later he has around fifty hundred-mile finishes, a left arm rebuilt with metal after a chainsaw accident, and no vision in his right eye following a stroke he returned to work from on Monday. This conversation is built around two runs. Last July, at 63, he ran the Last Annual Vol State Road Race - 314 miles across Tennessee in the July heat, from the banks of the Mississippi to the Georgia line. It is one of Lazarus Lake's journey races: no crew, no pacers, no aid stations, and no getting into a vehicle for any reason. Runners resupply at gas stations and Dollar Generals, sleep where they can, and rely on locals who set up canopies and coolers by the roadside. Andy finished 35th overall in seven days, thirteen hours and forty-seven seconds, fueled substantially by single-serve packets of Spam. Five months later, at 64, he ran 444 miles around the Florida National Scenic Trail - through swamp, past alligators, over a fence, alone except for his wife Amy in a truck. He missed the fastest known time by a couple of hours and finished anyway. In between there are the failures, and he is unusually good on them. A drop at the Moab 240 at mile 130 that he attributes squarely to sleep deprivation and one bad decision. A start at the Cowboy 200 he took on knowing he had COVID. Years in his fifties when he pulled out of races he could have finished because he wasn't going to break twenty-four hours and that mattered more to him than finishing. He describes the moment that stopped, and the friend he sought out as a mentor because she finishes everything she starts. He and Amy have run A1 Ultra Events since 2018, when they borrowed money to buy a struggling hundred-miler called the Long Haul. It had sixteen finishers. They cut the price to seventy-five dollars, handed a belt buckle to everyone who made the cutoff, earned nothing, and turned it into the only Western States qualifier in the third most populous state in the country. There is also a stranger in a Deadwood casino bar in 2011 who, hearing that this Florida man had just dropped out of a hundred-miler, told him he ought to be ashamed of himself attempting something like that at his age. Andy was 49. He went home, trained through the winter, and at 50 ran the fastest hundred of his life - nineteen hours and fifty-six minutes at Heartland, sixth overall. He has been collecting at-your-age moments ever since. On September 25 he goes back to Nebraska for the Cowboy 200, the race he abandoned last year. He'll be 65. For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

  7. Aug 30

    Episode 44 - Neville McKeown | Old Fart, New Life:Stage4 Cancer, 475 Weeks Unbroken, Instagram at 70

    In this episode of Run Long After 60, I sit down with Neville McKeown — a 70-year-old from Durban, South Africa, who found me on Instagram lifting weights with a smile on his face, and who turned out to have one of the most remarkable stories I have ever put on this show. When we recorded this, Neville had hit his weekly fitness goal 475 weeks in a row. More than nine years without missing a single one. That number is higher now, and he is walking toward 500. He did not miss during stage 4 cancer. He had it in every lymph gland he possessed, from his neck to his groin. Thirteen bags of chemotherapy in a day. Radiation with his head and shoulders pinned under a mask, unable to swallow, while being claustrophobic. And the day after chemo he was out in his garden cutting down trees. Not little trees. Big trees. The story of how he was diagnosed is something I still have not gotten over, and I am not going to spoil it here. Seven years clear. And then in January, at 70 years old, having never touched social media in his life, he opened an Instagram account. One post has been seen more than 409,000 times. We talk about: • The 475-week streak, and the South African medical aid scheme that actually pays members to stay fit • The first hundred weeks he lost to a system change, and why he just started over • Two lumps on his neck he never felt, found during an unrelated ear appointment • The misdiagnosis — and the four words from the oncologist that changed the whole day • A chance dinner, a windy table, and the stranger who told him to get a second opinion • The professor in Richards Bay, and what five minutes with the right doctor feels like • What a year of treatment actually involved, and why he never stopped going to the gym • His regimen: free weights, old school, technique first • Golf, beer, wine festivals, and refusing to give any of it up • The trampoline with his grandchildren, and what balance means at 70 • Finding Instagram at 70 with no experience at all • "It's taken me 70 years to get an interview. How can I be an inspiration?" Neville is not a lifelong athlete. He is not chasing a race. He is a man who decided that the one thing cancer was not going to take from him was showing up — and who is now, at 70, doing more than he has ever done. Old fart, new life. Four words. He earned every one of them. Run Long After 60 is a video-first podcast focused on running after 60, ultrarunning, longevity, and staying active later in life. If you'd like to watch the full conversation, you can find the video version on the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel. 🎧 Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, or Amazon Music to follow the journey. 📍 Hosted by Mark Vega

  8. Aug 23

    Episode 43 - Dean Karnazes | When I'm 64 | 34 Years and He Still Hasn't Stopped

    In this episode of Run Long After 60, I sit down with Dean Karnazes — on his 64th birthday. He quit running at fifteen. He didn't start again until the night he turned thirty, when he walked out of a bar in San Francisco after too much tequila, took off his pants, and ran thirty miles into the dark in a pair of silk boxer shorts. That night changed his life. Thirty-four years later he has never taken a season off, never had a real break, and he says he's never had a running injury. Ten Badwater 135s and one outright win. Twelve Western States, eleven of them under twenty-four hours. Fifty marathons in fifty states in fifty days...the FIRST person to do anything like that and an effort that has been replicated, enhanced and celebrated for many for years. His books are published in twenty-one languages. There are a thousand interviews out there covering his records, and he's told those stories better than anyone could ask him to again. What I wanted to know was what thirty-four unbroken years actually feels like from the inside — at 64, on the day he turns 64. He told me he doesn't celebrate his birthday. Then he said that now that I'd told everybody, he supposed he'd have to. He also told me he isn't 64 at all. He thinks of life as an out-and-back course. He turned around at fifty. So by his math he's thirty-six now, counting down to zero. We talk about: Ikaria — his mother's island, one of the world's Blue Zones, and the 104-year-old who walked five kilometers to the bank to start a new businessWhy longevity there looks like ease and not effort, and what that does to a man who built a life on effortNever having a running injury in three decades, and whether that's luck or something he did on purposeThe shorter, quicker stride he runs now, and driving his arms to spare his kneesHow he went from dismissing trekking poles to building his whole mountain climbing around themDNFs, and his honest answer about what you actually learn from themWriting in A Runner's High about whether he was still relevant to the sport — and where that worry wentBeing appointed global ambassador of Greek tourism, and what the two-year role was really likeRacing in Greece, where he's often the only American on the start lineThe 110-miler that finishes on the ancient track at Olympia, where the first Games were held in 776 BCSpartathlon, Pheidippides, and the 350-mile race in November he's training for nowWhat it's like when strangers tell him their father read his book and now they're runnersAnd the accidental Instagram DM from a stranger in January 2025 that led to this conversation Dean is 100% Greek, third generation, born in California and now spending most of the year in Greece. He's still racing. He's still writing. He's still showing up. Thank you and many happy years, Dean. Run Long After 60 is a video-first podcast about running after 60, ultrarunning, longevity, and refusing to stop. The full conversation is on the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel. 🎧 Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, or Amazon Music to follow the journey. 📍 Hosted by Mark Vega

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About

Run Long After 60 is a podcast about durability, curiosity, and continuing to do hard things as the years stack up. Hosted by Mark Vega, the show features long-form conversations with runners, endurance athletes, coaches, creatives, and professionals who are still showing up — often well past the age when society expects people to slow down. This is not a podcast about speed, podiums, or shortcuts. It’s about adaptation. Perspective. And learning how to keep moving forward — physically, mentally, and creatively — over the long arc of a life. Episodes are often recorded in motion, including running intros captured mid-workout, because this show isn’t about talking around endurance. It’s about living it. Conversations explore training, aging, setbacks, reinvention, discipline, failure, resilience, and the quiet decisions that allow people to keep going long after others have stopped. Run Long After 60 is for anyone who believes that endurance doesn’t expire — it evolves. 🎙 New episodes weekly 📍 Hosted by Mark Vega

Information

  • Creator
    Mark Vega
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    50
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Mark Vega
  • Show Website
    Run Long After 60

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