On a cloudless Sunday afternoon in April, a 100-year-old
woman named Ida Keeling laced up her mustard yellow sneakers and took to the
track at the Fieldston School in the Bronx. Her arrival was met without
fanfare. In fact, no one in the stands seemed to notice her at all.
It is possible the spectators were distracted by the girls’
soccer game taking place on the field. Or perhaps they were simply unaware that
Ms. Keeling is a reigning national champion.
When she runs, Ms. Keeling occupies a lane all her own. She
has held several track-and-field records since she began racing in her late
60s, and she still has the fastest time for American women ages 95 to 99 in the
60-meter dash: 29.86 seconds. In the
week to come, she plans to compete in a 100-meter event where she hopes to
establish a new standard for women over 100 years old.
“You see so many older people just sitting around — well,
that’s not me,” said Ms. Keeling, who is barely 1.44 m and weighs 38 kg. “Time
marches on, but I keep going.”
Ms. Keeling was not always such an accomplished runner. As a
child growing up in Harlem, she preferred riding bikes or jumping rope. “I was
pretty fast as a girl,” she said. “What makes me faster now is that everyone
else slowed down.”
When the Depression hit, Ms. Keeling started a series of
jobs washing windows and babysitting for neighbors. Her family, who for years
lived in the back of her father’s grocery, was forced into even more humbling
circumstances when the store went out of business.
“I learned to stand on my own two feet during the
Depression,” she said. “It taught you to do what you had to do without anyone
doing it for you.”
Ms. Keeling’s resilience only deepened with time. After her
husband died of a heart attack at 42, she was left to raise their four children
on her own. She moved the family into a one-bedroom apartment in a Harlem
housing project and took up work sewing in a factory, all the while contending
with the abuses and indignities endured by black women in mid-20th-century
America. As the civil rights movement took shape, Ms. Keeling became an active
demonstrator.
“I always understood from mother that you die on your feet
rather than live on your knees,” said her daughter Shelley Keeling.
Over time, that resolve was gravely tested. While serving
overseas in the Navy and in the Army, Ms. Keeling’s older sons, Donald and
Charles, developed a crippling drug. Ms. Keeling watched in horror as both boys
withdrew into the world of drugs.
In 1978, Ms. Keeling received a call from the police
informing her that Donald had been hanged. Around two years later, the phone
rang again: Charles was dead — beaten in the street with a baseball bat. Both
killings were suspected to be drug-related; neither was ever solved.
“I’ve never felt a pain so deep,” Ms. Keeling recalled, her
voice lowering to a whisper. “I couldn’t make sense of any of it and things
began to fall apart.”
As Ms. Keeling fell into a deep depression, her health began
to weaken. Her blood pressure shot up, along with her heart rate. The image of
her once-vital mother in such despair shook the younger Ms. Keeling. A lifelong
track-and-field athlete whose trophies fill an entire room of her apartment,
she intervened with the means of healing most familiar to her: running.
“It was trial by fire,” recalled Shelley Keeling, 64, who
has coached track and field at Fieldston School in the Bronx for 21 years.
“Based on where she was emotionally, it just had to be.”
Ms. Keeling, then 67, registered for a five-kilometer race
through Brooklyn. It had been decades since she had last gone running.
“Good Lord, I thought that race was never going to end, but
afterwards I felt free,” Ms. Keeling recalled. “I just threw off all of the bad
memories, the stress.”
The sunset career of Ida Keeling began at a time when most
of her peers were settling in for a future of seated yoga or abandoning
athletics altogether. In the decades since, she has traveled across the world
for competitions. She often races alone, the only contestant in her age group.
To maintain her health, Ms. Keeling adheres to a strict diet
(“I eat for nutrition, not for taste”) and exercise (“I’ve got to get my hour
in every day”). Every afternoon Shelley Keeling leads her mother through a
routine that includes push-ups, wall sits, shoulder presses and sprints back and
forth on the balcony of her apartment in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
Ms. Keeling lives alone and says that self-sufficiency is a key to her
longevity.
“I don’t beg anybody for nothing,” she said. “I wash, cook,
iron, clean and shop.”
Ms. Keeling avoids food products with preservatives,
favoring fresh grains and produce, along with limited portions of meat.
Desserts are rarities, and a tablespoon of cod-liver oil supplements breakfast
most mornings. Despite her exceptional discipline, Ms. Keeling allows herself
one indulgence. “This is putting gas in the car,” she said before downing a
tall shot of Hennessy cocktail.
There are days when Ms. Keeling battles a surge of arthritis
or a hint of melancholy. “I never want to go backwards,” she said. “I’m a
forward type of person.”
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Photo Credit: Elias Jerel Williams for The New York Times
Article The New York Times (abridged)
