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.

🎧 Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, or Amazon Music to follow the journey.

📍 Hosted by Mark Vega

In this episode of Run Long After 60, I sit down with Dean Karnazes — on his 64th birthday.

He quit running at fifteen. He didn't start again until the night he turned thirty, when he walked out of a bar in San Francisco after too much tequila, took off his pants, and ran thirty miles into the dark in a pair of silk boxer shorts. That night changed his life. Thirty-four years later he has never taken a season off, never had a real break, and he says he's never had a running injury.

Ten Badwater 135s and one outright win. Twelve Western States, eleven of them under twenty-four hours. Fifty marathons in fifty states in fifty days...the FIRST person to do anything like that and an effort that has been replicated, enhanced and celebrated for many for years. His books are published in twenty-one languages.

There are a thousand interviews out there covering his records, and he's told those stories better than anyone could ask him to again. What I wanted to know was what thirty-four unbroken years actually feels like from the inside — at 64, on the day he turns 64.

He told me he doesn't celebrate his birthday. Then he said that now that I'd told everybody, he supposed he'd have to. He also told me he isn't 64 at all. He thinks of life as an out-and-back course. He turned around at fifty. So by his math he's thirty-six now, counting down to zero.

We talk about:

• Ikaria — his mother's island, one of the world's Blue Zones, and the 104-year-old who walked five kilometers to the bank to start a new business
• Why longevity there looks like ease and not effort, and what that does to a man who built a life on effort
• Never having a running injury in three decades, and whether that's luck or something he did on purpose
• The shorter, quicker stride he runs now, and driving his arms to spare his knees
• How he went from dismissing trekking poles to building his whole mountain climbing around them
• DNFs, and his honest answer about what you actually learn from them
• Writing in A Runner's High about whether he was still relevant to the sport — and where that worry went
• Being appointed global ambassador of Greek tourism, and what the two-year role was really like
• Racing in Greece, where he's often the only American on the start line
• The 110-miler that finishes on the ancient track at Olympia, where the first Games were held in 776 BC
• Spartathlon, Pheidippides, and the 350-mile race in November he's training for now
• What it's like when strangers tell him their father read his book and now they're runners
• And the accidental Instagram DM from a stranger in January 2025 that led to this conversation

Dean is 100% Greek, third generation, born in California and now spending most of the year in Greece. He's still racing. He's still writing.

He's still showing up.

Thank you and many happy years, Dean.

Run Long After 60 is a video-first podcast about running after 60, ultrarunning, longevity, and refusing to stop. The full conversation is on the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel.

🎧 Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, or Amazon Music to follow the journey.

📍 Hosted by Mark Vega

The race has been held seven times. John Clarke started all seven. John Clarke finished all seven.

Nobody else has ever done that, and nobody else ever will. It isn't a record waiting to be broken — it's closed. To match it you would have to go back to 2020 and start over, and 2020 is gone.

The Last Annual Heart of the South is Lazarus Lake's journey race. You park your car at a farm in Castle Rock, Georgia, overlooking the Tennessee River. You board a bus. Nobody tells you where it's going — Arkansas, Kentucky, South Carolina, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, it changes every year. You check into a hotel, you eat the Last Supper, and roughly twelve hours before the start a GPX file lands on your phone. Then you run home. Three hundred and fifty-five miles this June. Four hundred in 2025. Three hundred twenty-six the year he won it outright.

No aid stations. No crew. No pacers. No course markings. You resupply at gas stations, and you sleep wherever you can — which for John usually means a church porch.

John Clarke is sixty-one years old and lives in Colorado Springs. He has fifty-eight races on his UltraSignup: Barkley, Hardrock, Moab 240 twice, Leadville, Leadman. In February he finished the Iditarod Trail Invitational — three hundred and fifty miles across Alaska in nine days and nineteen hours, five hours inside the cutoff. He holds fifty-four fastest known times across twenty states. He mentioned almost none of it on his own.

He carries a pack with a base weight of two pounds. Most of the field carries six to ten. He has published photographs of every item he takes. People still don't believe him.

This is the second episode of The Last Annual, an ongoing series about the runners who take on Lazarus Lake's three journey races — Vol State, the Heart of the South, and the Third Circle of Hell. It began with Will Cooper in Episode 40. Both men were found by Tim Hardy, who started making calls to runners over sixty and turned them into a season.

John walks Mark through the bus ride and the twelve hours that follow it. Ninety minutes of sleep a night for a week. Toe socks, road camber, and which side of the traffic you run on. Why he got certified as a coach in order to train exactly one athlete — himself. How his VO2 max went up as he got older. The four documentary films he shoots during the race and edits himself. And the twenty-five-year-old who beat him in 2024.

In this episode of Run Long After 60, I sit down with Lori Balue — a 63-year-old functional health practitioner from Southern California who was 225 pounds at 40, asthmatic, pre-diabetic, and on an inhaler a doctor told her she'd never get off.

She takes no medications now. She hiked San Bernardino Peak two days before we recorded this. She's got Mount San Jacinto this weekend and Mount Whitney in her sights.

But this isn't a weight-loss episode.

Lori has told that version of her story on twenty-five other podcasts, and she tells it well. What nobody had ever asked her about was the trail — and what she eats to get up it. So that's where I kept steering, and I interrupted her more than once to do it. She was a good sport about it. You'll hear me say "Mark, let her talk" out loud near the end, because I knew some of you were thinking it.

What comes out is a conversation I haven't had with anyone else on this show. Lori walks through her entire fueling protocol line by line — keto bricks cut into pieces in a front pouch, Ketone IQ on the climb out of the Grand Canyon, free-form amino acids, creatine, collagen, and roughly ten grams of sodium on a 110-degree day at the bottom of the Canyon. At the Glacier Half Marathon she skipped every single water station. She was already saturated with electrolytes and didn't want plain water at all.

We also get into where fat adaptation actually holds up for the hundred- and two-hundred-mile crowd, and where it might not.

And there's the woman who started all of it. A 70-year-old who blew past Lori on the climb out of Phantom Ranch back when Lori was 52 and hurting. Legs like a 40-year-old. Ten miles a day. Hiked the Canyon every year. Lori says she didn't understand what she was looking at until years later.

We talk about:

• Being 200 pounds at twelve, and what her mother did about it in the 1970s
• Losing her father to diabetes and a sister to cancer — and what that does to how you eat
• The food sensitivity work that finally moved the weight after decades of failed diets
• Eight hours down to Phantom Ranch in 2016 on knees she thought were finished
• Rim to rim at 60, seventeen miles, and the difference a hundred pounds makes
• Why she rejects "chronic cardio" and rarely trains for the races she enters
• Protein synthesis after 60, and why she thinks most older runners are under-fueling it
• Handing salt to strangers half her age on the Grand Canyon switchbacks
• Tim Noakes reversing his own position on carbohydrate
• Two weeks on the road with her 87-year-old mother, and a truck tent at Bryce Canyon
• The 500-foot descent in Yellowstone she refused to take at 40 — and hiked last summer

Lori is a Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner and an Adapt-Certified Functional Health Coach. She is not a physician, and she says so herself on the record. Everything here is her own experience and her own practice — it isn't medical advice, and it's no substitute for talking to your own doctor before you change how you eat, train, or supplement.

She's 63. She's not on a single medication. And she is out there.

Find Lori at loribalue.com and on Instagram at @loribalueweightloss.

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.

🎧 Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, iHeart, or Amazon Music to follow the journey.

📍 Hosted by Mark Vega

You pay your entry fee. You drive to a cornfield in Bryant, Georgia, and you park your car. You get on a tour bus. Nobody tells you where the bus is going.

That's how the Last Annual Heart of the South begins. Somewhere out there — for Will Cooper, it was three hundred and fifty-five miles away this year — the bus stops. The route arrives by email the night before. There is no crew, no aid, no course markings, no pacers. There is a rolling cutoff called the Grim Reaper. And there is your own car, waiting where you left it, ten and a half days away on foot.

Will Cooper is sixty-seven years old. He has two artificial hips. He gave up running more than twenty years ago and walks every step of every race he enters. He has started the Heart of the South seven times — every edition there has ever been — and finished it six, most recently this June in ten days and ten hours, with roughly two and a half hours to spare.

He came in second from last. It was the third time he's done that. He tells you so without a trace of apology.

This is the first episode of The Last Annual Podcast Series, a limited series about the runners who take on Gary Cantrell's journey races. Cantrell — better known as Lazarus Lake — created the Barkley Marathons, the Barkley Fall Classic, Big's Backyard Ultra, Little Bigs Backyard Ultra, Strolling Jim, A Race for the Ages, the Last Annual Vol State Road Race, and the Last Annual Third Circle of Hell. He starts his races by lighting a cigarette. His runners call them journey races, and there is no better word for what they are.

Will walks through all of it: the eight-pound pack and what's in it, the food deserts where the next resupply is thirty-seven miles out, the rookie year he spent three days swearing he'd never come back, and the woman he met on the road who told him he was signing up again.

He talks about the last fifteen miles, the naps in the briars, and the cliff a quarter mile from the finish. He explains the mental arithmetic that breaks people long before their legs give out — and why the Barkley Fall Classic, a 50K, has beaten him four times when three hundred and fifty miles has not.

He's joined by Tim Hardy, returning to the show for a third time. Eighteen years of an unbroken daily run streak, five Vol State finishes, three at the Heart of the South, and a pack carrying more cigars than food — which he uses to stay awake in the small hours and to run off loose dogs. Tim is the reason this series exists. He started making calls to people over sixty who are out there doing these races, and the calls turned into a series.

"Don't mistake my enthusiasm for my ability. Because I just barely get by in everything I do."

A few days after this episode drops, Will Cooper stands on another start line — the Last Annual Third Circle of Hell. Four hundred and twenty miles. Thirty-four entrants. Eight of them over sixty.

For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.

Ann Trason is widely considered the greatest female ultrarunner of all time — 14 Western States wins, 20 world records, a career that rewrote what was possible. But this episode isn't about any of that.

It's about who Ann is at 65. With rheumatoid arthritis attacking her joints. Using a walker. Refusing surgery after spiral fractures. And training right now to climb Aconcagua, the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, by December 2027.

Ann joined Mark Vega on Run Long After 60 for a rare on-camera conversation — warm, funny, honest, and deeply human. She talks about patience and acceptance as the tools that actually get you through hard things. She talks about living in the now moment — not as a philosophy, but as the only practical way to manage a body that's fighting itself. And she talks about why, after years away from the spotlight, she's back — on her own terms, with her walker, her Crazy Ladies Running Club, and her bucket list very much alive.

This one will stay with you.

In this episode:

• What rheumatoid arthritis actually feels like — and why Ann says her body (and her walker and trekking poles) are just tools to get her where she wants to go
• The now moment: what ultrarunning taught her, and how it applies to the hardest chapters of life
• Her return at Across the Years — 112 miles with a walker, a turtle night light, and Ken Michaels blowing her cover on Facebook
• The spicy decision — refusing surgery for spiral fractures while wearing a plunger hat
• Hiring her first coach ever at 65: watching Ryan Mitchell climb Everest at 19 on YouTube, tracking down coach Alan Arnette, and two Zoom calls in two days
• Aconcagua: the dream, the team, the porter(s), the 100 mph winds, and why this isn't about the summit
• The Crazy Ladies Running Club — how a walker stuck in a creek started something wonderful
• Dick Collins, Roger Daniels, Gard Leighton — the legends who shaped Ann and why their stories deserve to be told
• What she'd say to anyone in their 60s who thinks their best days are behind them
• The unicorn emoji — what it actually means

"I'm not magical. But I believe in magic. When I send that emoji, I'm saying — still believe in magic. Still reach for that rainbow."

Run Long After 60 is hosted by Mark Vega and celebrates athletes over 60 who refuse to stop, slow down, or be defined by their age. New episodes drop weekly. Subscribe wherever you listen. Follow on YouTube for the full video interview.