Seventy-four and still flying, by Kit Ramsden
An original contemporary interview.
Maureen Gallagher is late. Not for our interview, which she arrived at ten minutes early, but for her warm-up, which, she informs me, starts at eleven sharp and waits for no man, and certainly not for a journalist with a notebook. So we talk as she jogs gentle laps of the track at Harton Park, and I, who am half her age, struggle to keep up.
Maureen is seventy-four. She is a retired postwoman, a grandmother of five and, since last August, the British record holder for the women’s 100 metres in the seventy to seventy-four age group, with a time of 15.9 seconds. She took up sprinting eight years ago. Before that, she says, the fastest she had ever moved was ‘chasing a dog that had my glove’.
So why start at sixty-six? ‘My knee,’ she says. ‘I’d had it replaced, and the doctor told me to take it easy afterwards. I asked him what he meant by easy. He said walking. I said, how about running? He laughed. I didn’t.’
Recovery was slow. For four months she walked to the end of her street and back, then to the corner shop, then round the park. By the following spring she had joined the masters section of the local athletics club, where the youngest member was thirty-five. ‘They thought I was there for the tea,’ she says. ‘Then I beat the chairman in a handicap race. Nobody asked me about the tea after that.’
Her training would exhaust most people half her age. Three track sessions a week, two in the gym, a long walk every Sunday with her granddaughter’s spaniel. She keeps a notebook of every run she has ever done, written in tiny, careful handwriting, with comments in the margin: ‘Windy. Bad start. Must do better.’ Each one is dated. There are more than nine hundred entries.
Has it ever gone wrong? She laughs. Two years ago she tore a hamstring in the semi-final of the European masters championships in Portugal and was carried off the track by two physiotherapists. ‘Very handsome,’ she says. ‘Worth the injury.’ She was back running within ten weeks and set her record the following summer.
What drives her, I ask, as she finally slows to a walk. She thinks about it seriously. ‘When you get to my age, people start to decide things for you. That you’re frail. That you should sit down. That you shouldn’t be up a ladder, or on a bus on your own, or on a running track. Every time I cross that line, I’m telling them they’re wrong.’
She has no plans to stop. Next year she moves into the seventy-five age group, and she has already circled the date of the national championships in red on her kitchen calendar. Her target is to break sixteen seconds again, ‘and to beat Brenda from Gateshead, who thinks she’s the bee’s knees’.
As I leave, she is crouched at the start line, fingers spread on the track, eyes fixed on the far end. The starter raises his arm. I look back just in time to see her go: head down, arms pumping, a small white-haired blur heading at full speed into her seventy-fifth year.
Maureen Gallagher is described as unstoppable. How does the writer try to show this?
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