Every other day, Robert S. White goes out for a run. Sometimes he covers three miles, sometimes more like six. If the weather is good and the roads aren’t too slick, he runs through his Hampton, Va., neighborhood. If not, he drives to the gym and hits the treadmill.
Nothing unusual, except that White is 94 years old.
The older he gets, the more inspiring he becomes to other runners who see him at local races. “I love to hear people say, ‘How do you do it?’” he says. “I do eat that up. I do feel proud to hear the cheers when I finish. I want to show people you can always keep going, even if you have to slow down.”
Since he began running in his early 60s, White has competed at every distance from a 5K to a marathon, setting several age group records along the way. Last year, at age 93, the World War II veteran became the oldest-ever person in Virginia to complete an officially certified 10K race, according to USA Track & Field. He covered the 6.2 miles in 1:48:01, for a per-mile pace of 17 minutes, 25 seconds.
That feat was particularly impressive due to unseasonably warm temperatures, a mostly shade-free route and a two-hour delayed start caused by a suspicious package found on the Yorktown course, recalls Greg Dawson, vice president of the Williamsburg-based Colonial Road Runners.
Conditions were miserable for everyone, let alone a person over 90 years of age,” Dawson says. “If asked to describe Robert in one word, I would call him ‘unstoppable’.”
Although White played some baseball growing up in North Carolina, that was about the extent of his previous athletic life. “I mean, I’d run from my mama when she was after me with a stick, and I did find out I was pretty fast then,” he jokes.
White credits two of his five children for introducing him to running. At first, he wondered why his sons were going so slowly, as he dusted them at top speed. Then he figured out why: He was gassed after a couple of blocks, and they were still going strong. He had to learn how to train.
But then, White is no stranger to pushing himself. A Purple Heart recipient during World War II, the Army veteran fought in the Battle of the Bulge, a brutal winter battle that ran from 1944 to 1945 in northwest Europe and was a crucial turning point for Allied forces. “It was bad over there,” he says. “Talking about combat is too painful, but truth is it was teenagers who won that war. It was rare to find a man older than 21.”
White moved to Hampton in 1951 and worked in sheet metals at Newport News Shipbuilding for 37 years. He usually completes his training running solo, heading out from the home he shared with his wife of 72 years, Marie, until she died of cancer in 2015. Now a grandfather of 12 — and a great-grandfather many times over — “I need to count them up again,” he jokes –— he also enjoys fishing, dancing, writing poetry and painting pictures, especially of lighthouses.
Other than a little hearing loss, White says he’s in good health. He lives independently, with some help from family and friends. To avoid injury and soreness, he stretches regularly and stays on high alert for debris on his running routes. He eats healthy — sweet potatoes, butter beans, rice, greens and fish are favorites — drinks only water, coffee and lemonade, doesn’t smoke and gets plenty of rest. “I don’t run around with women, either,” he says with a chuckle.
Fellow runners have almost stopped being shocked by him. George Nelsen, president of the Peninsula Track Club, watched White run 22.5 miles during a 24-hour cancer fundraiser in 2016, a feat he repeated last year. About a month after the 2016 event, Nelsen saw White at another race. “He said, ‘I know what I did wrong. I went out too fast. I think I can do 50 miles!’ I was not about to tell him he couldn’t.”
Personal bests came during White’s first decade of running, including 19:30 in a 5K (6:17-minute miles) and 3:07:18 at the Shamrock Marathon in Virginia Beach (7:09-minute miles). He has run nine marathons in total, including the Boston Marathon at age 72. In 2009, he was inducted into the Virginia Peninsula Road Racing Hall of Fame.
It has gotten a little harder over time,” he concedes. “It seems like I run as fast, but somehow I don’t get there as quick. As far as how I feel, though, I feel just as good as I ever felt.”
So even as birthdays continue to accumulate, White has no plans to quit running. Only God, he says, knows when that will be. “Getting tired is nothing new — I mean, I got tired when I was younger, too,” he says. “That’s never a reason to give up.”
