An 88-Year-Old Woman Finished the Berlin Marathon After a Stranger Talked Her Out of Quitting

Ruth Richter had made up her mind to stop about 30K into Sunday’s Berlin Marathon, and the 88-year-old had already asked someone at the roadside for the way to the S-Bahn when a younger runner overheard her and would not hear of it. “That’s not happening. We’re running the marathon together now,” he told her, she said in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published Monday. (Her quotes are translated from German.)

The runner, whom she identified only as Carsten, got her to within 3K of the finish. By the time she arrived he was already there, having gone on ahead once she promised him she would make it. Richter crossed the line in 7:40:36, the oldest woman to finish this year’s race, the F.A.Z. reported.

“If I hadn’t met Carsten, I would have dropped out, I felt that bad,” she said. “You need someone to push you.” She was quick to share the credit: “Carsten played a big part in me getting my medal.” After the race she went home and, in her words, “sang and danced.”

Official results put Richter 50,061st overall and sixth of the six women aged 80 and over who finished, a category won by Britain’s Gina Little in 5:01:48. A year ago, at 87, Richter ran 7:22:29 and was fifth in the same age group, so Sunday’s run took her just 18 minutes longer. She runs for SCC Berlin, the Sport-Club Charlottenburg she joined before she ever took up running. At the front of a field the organizers say drew more than 56,000 entrants, Guye Adola won the men’s race in 2:02:50 and Tigst Assefa set a course record of 2:11:04, leading this year’s results.

She Started Running at 72

Sixteen years ago Richter had never run a race. She had come through two serious cancers, and the recovery from the second took five years. “I thought: you have to do something for your body,” she said. Her way into the sport was the clothing check at Sport-Club Charlottenburg’s races, where she minded runners’ things while they were out on the course. Their enthusiasm when they came to collect them eventually won her over, and at 72 she entered a race herself, with no build-up at all. Not every one of those early races ended at a finish line. “But I’m someone who doesn’t let things get me down easily,” she said.

She did little in the way of specific preparation for Berlin. Her sports doctor’s rule is that 10K a week will carry someone through a marathon, and she ran about that in the weeks before the race. She also enters virtual races of 5K, 10K and the half-marathon, where runners set their own route. On Monday her legs still needed another day to recover, and she put Sunday’s struggle down to her training. “Not because of the marathon, but because I was too lazy for it,” she said. “I didn’t train enough.” Her advice to newcomers is to hold off on the marathon and start with a 5K.

Three Half-Marathons Before Next Year’s Berlin

She has promised Carsten she will be back for next year’s race, even though she told him out on the course that this marathon would be her last. When he asked at the finish, she gave in. “Fine, I said, promised,” she recalled.

October comes first, with three half-marathons on her calendar. “That’s only 21 kilometers,” she said, adding that they tire her out as well.