Fifty-thousand runners will line up Sunday for the New York City Marathon, the world’s largest marathon. Jeannie Rice will be among them. The 70-year-old Cleveland grandmother set a world record for her age group at last month’s Chicago Marathon.
Here & Now‘s Robin Young talks with Rice about the achievement, and what drove her to become an elite runner.
“At first I started running just to lose a few pounds, and a friend of mine at the time, she was a runner, and she talked me into doing a 5-mile local race,” Rice says. “She was third, and I was right behind her at the race. And that was it. And since then, she never beat me. The very following year, I decided to run a marathon.”
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