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.

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.

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.

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📍 Hosted by Mark Vega