Inside Vancouver
Going the Distance
By Todd Parker published Jun 1, 2009
73-year-old Lone Wolf says doing a 24-hour relay by himself is “no big deal”
This is the pace I keep in a 24-hour run,” Lone Wolf tells me as we walk along Pender toward the YWCA on Hornby. “Lone Wolf” is the self-assigned nickname of Michael Breeze, a 73-year-old former banker who’s training for the 24 Hour Relay on June 21. Yes, we’re walking—when you’re in your 70s, preparing for an ultrarun is about teaching your body to slow down.
As my forehead breaks out in a sweat I wish I could say we’re keeping a brisk pace. But we’re not. We’re moving at about the same pace Breeze used during the Sun Run in April and the Vancouver Marathon in May, the pace he’s used to log more than 48,000 miles in the well-worn notebook he’s kept since 1978. Over those three decades, he’s completed 48 half-marathons, 66 marathons, and 25 ultra-marathons, as well as many other races. The first time he did a 24-hour race, in 1986, he had just turned 50. He ran his first 24 Hour Relay in Vancouver to celebrate his 70th birthday, completing a symbolically appropriate 70 miles. This year he hopes to improve on his best result, when he did 80 miles in 2007. For his 75th birthday in 2011, he plans to run the Boston Marathon for the 15th time.
Seventy miles equals 28 times around a 2.5-mile route. Average speed: 2.9 miles an hour. No big deal, as Breeze likes to say, and I suppose it’s not—at least for the first hour. But what about the next 23 hours? At five foot nine and 141 pounds, he’s lean and aerodynamic; even his face is thin and angular. His stride is so fluid and balanced that he rarely suffers the injuries that plague other distance runners.
