Member Profile: Steve Davidson, 78

A long-term competitive racer and triathlete, Steve Davidson was one more elite athlete who just learned to live with injury after injury and “power through” them to keep racing. In the last year-and-a-half since training with Brian Clarke, Steve has been injury-free and is serving as a model and mentor to others. Here’s Steve in his own words: 

I’ve been running competitively since the early ’90s. I’d never had a running coach until recently, when I joined Brian’s group. It was always easy to find training programs online, so I just coached myself. But what’s really remarkable is that I have been injury-free for a year and a half now since I’ve been training with Brian. 

 In my early years I ran without any serious injury. But after that I just started getting injury after injury, and like many runners, I simply learned how to deal with them. I had PTs and orthopedic surgeons on retainer. But the problem with these injuries is that they screw up your training.

So if I was training for a marathon, what might end up happening is: I’d get injured in week 10 and I’d have to take a month off or do very little, and then I’d have two weeks before the marathon, which is when you should actually start tapering your training, not ramping it up. Nor do I really know if I’ve recovered from my injury, so I’d go into the race not knowing if I’m going to be able to make it through. And forget about whatever plans I had for a pace or a record or a finish or anything, now it’s just: “Can I make it through without making my injury worse?” But I don’t find out until mile 18 that yeah, it’s still there.

So you’re not really running a marathon anymore, you’re just trying to get through without pain. That is a cycle that would repeat many times. And I’m not alone in this, it’s very typical of what runners go through. 

It all comes down to the same mentality, which is just pushing yourself through. When I was doing Ironmans, I was training six days a week, often two times per day, on top of work. So there was never really a lot of rest, and there wasn’t much recovery. And that’s just what people did. I did it for years.

In 2022 I retired from Triathlons. The only thing I’m doing seriously now at 78 is running. And the rest and recovery that Brian emphasizes is as important as anything that we do. Whereas in triathlon training it was just one day of recovery and six days of training – with Brian, we run three times a week. And when we go, we go much easier than I have gone before. Brian’s mantra is: go relaxed and comfortable, and I’ve done many races since I started training this way. 

 Brian’s training is unique. He certainly can set himself aside from pretty much everyone else. This is my first pure run training. But having been in four or five different triathlon training groups and knowing a lot of them, many are what we call “balls to the walls” all the time. That’s just the common wisdom. Some other groups may not be as hardcore, but a lot of them do these intense interval trainings. If I go online for a marathon training program, it’s going to have intervals one day a week, a tempo run at race pace one day a week, and a long run one day a week. Brian would say running race pace every week is too much stress on your body. And it intertwines with the emphasis on recovery and going easy and not getting injured and not going too hard. I think for people who don’t run much, it can be really intimidating to go with the common wisdom. 

 I still race competitively at 78, though I have to recognize that your capacity drops off dramatically after 75. Sometimes I’m happy with my results, sometimes I’m not. But I still often get medals. A lot of it may just serve as an example that someone can do this for 30 to 40 years. In my last marathon, I had a young guy come up to me who must have been in his 20s, and he said, “How do you keep doing this without getting injured?” People can see that you can keep healthy and have fun, and I think there’s a lot of value in that.