Paula Radcliffe, Marathon Record Holder, Turns 40

Published by Runner's World on Deecmber 18, 2013

Paula Radcliffe turns 40 today. The marathon world record holder from Great Britain is now officially a masters runner.

Her plans to do the 2012 London Marathon and the Olympic marathon in that city were undone by foot problems, and she had foot surgery in August of that year. In March of this year, she acknowledged that she’d done only short jogs in the interim, and that her elite career might be over.

“The most important thing is to run healthy,” Radcliffe told Runner’s World Newswire Tuesday through an email to her husband and coach, Gary Lough. As for competitions in her new age group, Radcliffe stated, “I can't say that I would ever focus on masters records."

Though perhaps too much attention is given to Radcliffe’s Olympic disappointments, which sometimes coincided with injury, it needs to be remembered that she ran 2:15:25 at the London Marathon in 2003, when men were still considered elite for slower times than that. Of course, her record (which broke her own previous mark of 2:17:18 the year before in Chicago) still stands, and doesn’t seem to be danger of being erased any time soon.

Radcliffe made her first big international mark in Boston by winning the IAAF World Junior Cross Country Championships in the snow in 1992. She was an open world cross country champion in 2001 and 2002, a marathon gold medalist at the world championships in 2005, a world half marathon title holder three times, a Commonwealth Games gold medalist in the 5000 and a European Championships gold medalist in the 10,000.