Then I found an article (Ed Whitlock and the Age of Simplicity) written by Scott Douglas forRunners World (Feb 15, 2010). It’s a wonderfully revealing article about the real Ed Whitlock! Here are my favorite parts:

“Whitlock lives two and a half blocks from the cemetery, and does all of his training there. Speed work, daily maintenance runs, long runs of up to 3 hours, everything, meted out in loops that take no more than 5 minutes. He leaves his house with his day’s assignment decided and runs loops until his time is up. He doesn’t count loops or time them. He does look at his watch frequently and think, ‘What is taking so damn long?’ The day’s loop varies occasionally, sometimes dictated by the presence of grounds crew or gravediggers. He never runs the full perimeter loop. The last little section on the southwestern side of the cemetery would add another minute or so, but it includes a rise, perhaps 50 yards long, with the steepness of a handicap-accessibility ramp. ‘I choose not to tackle this hill,’ Whitlock explains. ‘I don’t like hills.’”

“When at the height of marathon training, Whitlock does cemetery loops for 3 hours a day, every day. He doesn’t do pick-ups or progression runs or marathon-pace work. He doesn’t even stop for water. Just 3 hours a day of what he calls ‘plodding’ or ‘jogging.’ ‘I run to race,’ he says. ‘I don’t do it primarily for my health or anything else.’”

“Living in Quebec in the ‘70’s, Brenda was at a school sports day when a teenager told her the running club was looking for a coach. ‘My wife said, “My husband used to run. He knows all about running,” Whitlock says with a laugh. ‘A, I don’t know anything about running. B, I have no ambition to be a coach. I’m too selfish. But I had been committed. When I went to practice, nobody showed any interest in me. I would just lean against the fence. I thought I might as well do some jogging around the track. This was quite a sight, because old men of 40 didn’t run in those days. I kept showing up and jogging around and ended up racing again because of that. It just kind of happened.’”

“Less than six months shy of his 70th birthday, Whitlock ran 2:54 at the 2000 Columbus Marathon. ‘I thought, “We’re okay now,” he says. “Maybe foolishly, I decided to try for sub-3 once I was 70 in London, Ontario. There were only about 300 people in the race, and I got hung out to run by myself the last half of the race.” Whitlock missed the mark with an agonizingly close 3:00:23. The 2- and 3-hour runs built on each other, and at the 2003 Toronto Marathon, at age 72, Whitlock met his goal with a 2:59:09. The following year, with several months of plodding buoying him, he returned to Toronto and ran 2:54:48. About that race, Whitlock, who is not given to rhapsody about life‘s endeavors, says, ‘That was a good day. It was never a struggle.’”

“Whitlock, who says, ‘I stay away from doctors, they’re bad people,’ last had a physical exam when he was 40. His uncle Arthur was Britain’s oldest man when he died in 2000 at age 108. Whitlock last took an aspirin during World War II.”

“‘Running should be a pastime,’ he says. ‘All sports should be a pastime. There shouldn’t be all this professional stuff. I believe that Paula Radcliffe is drug-free, but I do think she pushes the envelope of being a professional runner to the extreme. I don’t mean to single her out, but she’s living an artificial existence. She’s always away from home or sleeping in an altitude chamber. She has this entourage of people constantly around her poking and prodding. That’s so far away from what I do and how I would want to live. Monomania leads to terrible things.’”