Mike Fremont.Photo: Matthew Allen/Matthewallenphoto
As Mike Fremont steadily jogs along his favorite routes near his home in Cincinnati, Ohio, he “salutes” nearly everyone he passes. They know him well, because at age 100, Fremont has been running these same paths for decades.
“They’re all accustomed to me,” he tells PEOPLE. “They say, ‘I’ve seen you here for 40 years!’ "
Fremont issomething of a running celebrity, even outside of Cincinnati — he holds multiple single-age world running records in everything from the mile to the marathon — but he came to the sport later in his long life. Fremont only started running in his late 30s, after the sudden death of his first wife from a brain hemorrhage left him widowed with three kids, including a 2-week-old.
“I was very stressed when my wife left me, and I needed to do something every day to take the stress off. So usually I’d take one of my little kids, and she would hold my little finger and we’d run,” he says. “I enjoyed it and I thought it was good for me. It was much better than the two martinis I used to have.”
“It was a terrible, terrible thing to tell me,” he says. Fremont lived beyond those three months, and two and a half years later, physicians removed the cancerous tumor. There were shocked to find there was no spread of the disease. Says Fremont: “The surgeon said that he had looked for metastasis in 35 places and found none. Zero.”
His wife of 29 years, Marilyn Wall, 69, proudly says “that’s when he started to make records for his age.”
Mike Fremont and his wife, Marilyn Wall.
“I took 53 seconds off the one-mile race record,” Fremont boasts. “I was very pleased.”
These days, Fremont says he has no plans totake down other world records. “I think I’m sensible enough not to try to run marathons at 100,” he says, before adding with a smile: “Why should I have anything to prove?”
Instead, Fremont is simply enjoying his days with Wall and his family, including five grandchildren and four great-grandchildren. On his 100th birthday, on Feb. 23, they celebrated with a vegan cake and a run along the ocean in Vero Beach, Florida.
Mike Fremont and Marilyn Wall.Matthew Allen/Matthewallenphoto
“I’m having the best time of my life,” Fremont says.
source: people.com
