Janice O’Grady was a solid mid-pack ultrarunner for her entire life. Then, over the course of two months in 2023, she set five women’s age-group world records. In her words, “My motto is, you don’t have to get faster, you just have to get older.” After turning 75 in 2023, she set the women’s 75-to-79 age-group world records for the 50-mile, 100k, and 100-mile distances, as well as for 12 hours and 24 hours.
O’Grady found ultrarunning at age 38. She has taken a measured and pragmatic approach, to which she credits her longevity. Her first ultra was the 1987 Ice Age Trail 50 Mile, and since then, she’s done 148 ultras — 13 of them 100 milers.
From her early years as a lawyer in Minnesota, to moving to Northern California and embracing the running scene there in the 1990s, to becoming a race director, to retiring and moving to Colorado and starting up her own race, to setting five world records in 2023, O’Grady is showing what is possible at every age.
Janice O’Grady climbing toward Hope Pass during the 1992 Leadville 100 Mile. All photos courtesy of Janice O’Grady.
Her Start in Running
Living in Minneapolis, Minnesota, O’Grady didn’t start running until she was 33 years old. She remembers the switch to the lifestyle clearly, saying, “I quit smoking on January 1, 1982, and the law firm I worked at then had a bunch of runners. So, they sucked me into training for a 10-kilometer race that year.” She was already training for a marathon in 1984 when she met her future husband, Tom O’Connell, who had been running ultras since 1979.
After a few years of watching him run ultras and crewing for him, she knew she wanted to try one too, and signed up for the Ice Age Trail 50 Mile. O’Grady says, “There weren’t that many races then, and the closest 50 miler to us was the Ice Age Trail 50 Mile in Wisconsin, and so I went, and I ran it, and I said, ‘Ok, I’ll never do that again,’ but then I kept at it.”
It was a quick progression from there. Four years later, in 1991, she entered and finished the Western States 100. With a notoriously bad stomach and an inability to handle the heat, she seems well satisfied about the finish, saying, “The only reason I finished it that year was because it wasn’t hot. It never got over 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the canyons, if you can imagine that!”
She follows up, “I tried a couple of times after that, and of course, my stomach took me out because it was hot, and I was barfing all over the place. I’m glad I got to [finish] it once.”
O’Grady during the 1991 Western States 100.
California Running
Before there were ideas of running the Western States 100, the Nugget 50 Mile in California fully drew O’Grady into the sport of ultrarunning. In the early years, while still living in Minnesota, she and O’Connell regularly traveled to California to race, and the U.S. West Coast provided vastly different running terrain than Minnesota. According to O’Grady, “That was when I was hooked, once I got on mountain trails.”
The two continued to visit California for the racing, “You kind of had to go there because we didn’t have anything in Minnesota. And Northern California was the heart of ultrarunning back then.” The pair would take turns racing and crewing for each other.
When the law firm O’Grady was working at wanted to open a branch in California’s San Francisco Bay Area, she immediately volunteered to go. She wanted to be closer to the close-knit running community she and O’Connell had become part of there.
She says, “We had a wonderful group of ultrarunners in the Bay Area. There was probably a core of about a dozen or 15 of us, and then sometimes it would expand to 25 depending on what we were doing.” Saturday long runs were a weekly occurrence, and with so few ultras around, she says, “Everybody was always training for the same races at the same time, so depending upon what we were gunning for, we’d go out and run anywhere from 20 to 35 miles every Saturday, and it was so fun.”
The community in the area felt special. “We had a great core, and we all ran about the same pace, middle of the pack. And we would have so much fun on those runs, and then we would go to races together, they were good times.”
All the while, O’Grady was working at her law firm, where she was a partner, and structuring her training around the work that frequently saw her traveling and going for multiweek periods without running at all. “It was a juggling act,” she says, “but it worked.” Her work schedule forced O’Grady to run lower mileages than many of the people she regularly ran with, but she says the important training was always all about the Saturday long run.
More recently, O’Grady running the 2021 Heartland 50k.
Watching Ultrarunning Grow
O’Grady admits there was concern in the Northern California running community in the 1990s that the sport wouldn’t last. She says, “The comradeship was amazing. We were worried that the sport would die because there were so few of us and some were getting older and stopping running, so it seemed like the sport was shrinking. Then, all of a sudden, young people got interested.”
O’Grady observed, “The more the younger people got involved, the more they were interested in the science of it.” She laughs when she recounts her memories of her early years racing, “I mean, eventually we had PowerBars. That was the extent of special food. Otherwise, you ate food-food.” She continues, “Now, of course, it’s all about fueling, which we never thought about. You threw some stuff in your pack, and aid stations had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a bunch of snacky things, and that was it.”
It’s not only the fueling that’s changed, it’s also the number and size of races. “I think when I started, there were five 100 milers in the U.S., and now there are hundreds.” O’Grady says, “Everybody’s got the science of training plans, and we never had any of that. We didn’t have fancy running clothes. It’s really evolved, and it’s been fun to watch it, and I’m glad I can still be a part of it!”
Race Directing
O’Grady not only ran races but also helped to direct them. It was an integral way to be involved with and give back to the running community that meant so much to her.
She was a race director, alongside O’Connell, for the Quicksilver Endurance Runs, starting in 1999, and helped organize the event with her Quicksilver Running Club. It was a group of friends putting on a fun race, and she smiles when describing how the tasks were divided up. “Everything was so organized already when we started directing,” she says. Even after she and O’Connell moved to Conifer, Colorado, in 2006, they continued to direct the event in 2007 before passing it on.
It didn’t take long before O’Grady started another race in Colorado. After running the vast trail network in the Buffalo Creek area in her backyard and realizing how extensive and beautiful it was, she measured all the segments and put together a 50-mile and 50k route, which she called the North Fork 50 Mile/50k.
O’Grady running the 2024 North Fork 50k, a race she co-founded and directed until 2020.
Finding people in the Colorado running community to help out wasn’t hard. Of starting the race in 2010, she says, “I was on the ultra email list, and so I said, ‘Hey, anybody in the Denver area interested in helping me start a race?’ And I got six volunteers right like that. And five of them became the aid station captains.” She continues, “Three of them were still aid station captains 10 years later when I turned it over to a new race director in 2020.”
Chasing World Records
Through it all, O’Grady kept running.
In 2006, at age 58, O’Grady retired from being a lawyer, saying, “One of the reasons I retired early was because I still wanted to run, and I never really got a chance to do it like I felt I could do it.” Moving to Colorado after retirement gave her a new set of trails on which to train and run.
She says she was always a middle-of-the-pack runner throughout her career, but she trained hard and continued to love the sport when many people her age struggled with injuries or a lack of motivation and stopped running.
She’d never even considered herself in contention for a world record until right before she was set to race the 2023 Tunnel Hill 50 Mile. A little bit before the race, someone asked her, “Have you seen what the American record is for 50 miles for the women’s 75-to-79 age group?” She had no idea.
O’Grady found that the American age-group record was over 18 hours, and no official world record existed yet. She now had a goal in mind and dialed in her training, “I stopped doing the mountain trails for a few months and focused on trying to run flatter.”
She found ways to compensate for living at elevation, “I did speedwork, or I should say not-so-slow work, on downhills because I live at 8,000 feet, and for years, I have not been able to sustain running on flats at this altitude. So, the only way that I could really run a whole mile without stopping to walk was to go downhill.” She explains, “I would try to run [downhills] as fast as I could to get the speedwork in and get my brain working at sustaining running and not walking every five minutes.”
She thrived at the Tunnel Hill 50 Mile’s low elevation and ran the double out-and-back course in 12:02:39, setting not only a new age-group American record but establishing an age-group world record.
It didn’t take long for O’Grady to start researching other age-group records, as she had already signed up for the Across the Years race in Arizona at the end of December 2023. She says, “We went there, and my husband Tom was so great. We set up so that we were right across from the timers, and they knew which [records] I was going for and what the times were. Tom would go over there when I was getting close so they were all ready. It went like clockwork.”
While O’Grady didn’t break her 50-mile record, she got the 12-hour, 100k, 24-hour, and 100-mile age group world records. While she’s proud of all of them, it’s the 100-mile mark of 29 hours, 50 minutes, and 33 seconds that she’s most pleased with. The prior record was just over 31 hours. “That was the one that I really wanted … that one I feel was an accomplishment, and I hope that one will hang on for a little while, but you never know.”
After a life of being mid-pack, O’Grady now has a new purpose and motivation for running, saying, “Having the age-group competitiveness has got me kind of more fired up about it now.”
O’Grady running the 2022 Jackpot 100 Mile, which was also the 2022 USATF 100 Mile Championships.
Longevity
O’Grady plans to keep running and racing as long as she can. She says, “Not many of us last into our 70s. Every time I go to a race, I’m the oldest female finisher, sometimes the oldest finisher, period, but I’ve only been last once.”
She quickly points out there are a bunch of runners about to enter the 75-plus age group, and she’s excited to see what they can do. “I think people have learned how to take care of themselves.” She points out that many top age-group runners “didn’t start [running] until they were in their 50s and some even 60s. So, they seem to do better in their 70s than those of us who started earlier.”
O’Grady no longer does a weekly long run, pushing the interval between big efforts to 10 days instead of seven. She also continues to be a relatively low-milage runner and says, “If I don’t have a race coming up and it’s a week that doesn’t have a long run in it, I might only run 15 miles.” But that doesn’t mean that O’Grady is sitting around the rest of the time, “I have my two-and-a-half-hour strength workouts. I stay pretty fit.”
She knows that she’s slowed down over the years and says the ongoing joke amongst her peers is, “You’re running the same as you always did, but there’s something wrong with the clock because the time is so slow.” But she’s not upset about the slower times, saying, “I love being out there, and if I’m slower, I get to be out there longer.”
Most people O’Grady used to run with have stepped away from the sport. But every month, those that can try to have a Zoom call to catch up, and O’Grady says that every year at the Western States 100, “A lot of the old gang still gathers at Foresthill [a village located at mile 62 of the race] in the afternoon to watch runners go by.”
O’Grady has several races coming up, including 3 Days at the Fair in New Jersey, where she hopes to get her 24-hour world record back — the only one that was bested this year. She says of running and racing at age 76, “I enjoy being out there, and I can do it, and it’s because I love it. I’ll keep at it as long as I can.”
Call for Comments
- Have you seen Janice O’Grady in action? Tell us your stories about her!
- Are you an older runner? What are your tips for longevity?
