Improving with age

Russ Lofgren grips a stopwatch with his finger on the start button. His eyes are on the display. "Go!" he shouts, initiating a training sprint on an indoor track.

It's a Thursday morning in late July, and the runner, Jim Hammond of Maple Grove, leaps from the start line in a burst of energy. His feet pound the track, arms pumping, hands open and karate-chopping air for 100 meters on a straightaway before skidding to a stop around a bend.

Hammond huffs, pausing for a moment before he begins to walk. He rounds the track and waits for the signal from Lofgren, his assistant, to start again.

As nonagenarian workout routines go, Hammond's sprint sessions might seem extreme: He runs five days a week, pounding out sprints and endurance runs up to 1.5 miles long. He lifts weights and works through aerobic routines, an hour on an elliptical machine each Saturday capping a week of workouts.

"That elliptical is the hardest," said Hammond, who turned 94 this past spring.

Born in 1914 and retired since the mid-1970s, Hammond falls into by unlikely demographic to be consumed in athletics. But for the past eight years, ever since he entered a competition called the Georgia Golden Olympics on a whim, he has pursued a passion to be the fastest grandpa on the planet.

Indeed, running multiple events in the Senior Olympics, Hammond has won more than a dozen gold medals since 2001. He has set national records for his age class, running 100 meters in 18.09 seconds and 200 meters in 42.35 seconds.

Reconnecting with the world

In pursuit of running records, Hammond said sprinting has changed his life. A widower who is legally blind, Hammond lives alone in an apartment in Maple Grove. But his connection to the outside world has grown each year with his involvement in sports.

In addition to his daily training at a health club, Hammond travels to multiple races each year. He has an assistant -- Lofgren, a friend from church -- and a personal trainer who designs workout regimens. At home, he reads e-mail from running friends with the font so enlarged that each word takes up almost a quarter of the screen.

"This is my connection to the world," he said while booting a program to reveal a dozen unread messages.

Originally from Kentucky, Hammond was delivered by his dad, a part-time doctor, in a bedroom at the family farmhouse in rural Logan County. The sixth of seven Hammond children, he graduated from high school in the depths of the Great Depression, shipping off to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., in hopes of a military career.

"I spent the better part of my early adult life trying to prove to everyone that I wasn't a failure," he said.

The result was a work ethic that rocketed Hammond up the corporate ladder at Delta Air Lines and Allstate Insurance, burgeoning corporations in the 1940s. Hammond soon was a family man, wife and children following him around the South as his career bloomed.

His roots are in running

Hammond has always been a runner. As a kid, racing with friends he called the "barefoot boys," his group sprinted shoeless through the Kentucky grass.

"I almost always won, even against the older boys," he said.

"He's an old dog who wants to learn new tricks," said Josh Malin, a personal trainer with LIFE Rehab Services in Wayzata who works with Hammond. "I can nitpick his technique, and he wants to get things exactly right, not just close."

Malin built a workout regimen that includes stretching, balance, weights and sprint drills. He trains Hammond for endurance and aerobic fitness for most of the year, switching to exercise tailored to fast-twitch muscle fibers when a race looms.

"I babied him at first with easier workouts," Malin said. "Now we get his heart rate into the 140s, and after a run his body recovers amazingly quick."

Malin noted that Hammond's time to run a mile -- about 12 minutes -- is faster than what many people in the general population can do, no matter their age.

Hammond said running and training for competitions keeps him physically and emotionally at his peak. Other than his poor vision, the result of macular degeneration, he has no health issues and takes no medications.

"Athletics can be a wonderful thing for seniors," he said. "It can keep you young."

Stephen Regenold is a Minneapolis writer with a daily blog at www.gearjunkie.com.