There aren’t many people on this planet—let alone septuagenarians—who can contemplate running 50 or 100 miles at a time. But for 77-year-old Eric Spector (MBA 1972), a retired entrepreneur and CEO in the tech, consumer retail, and media sectors, running long (long, long) distances is a way of life.

Fittingly, Spector’s journey to ultrarunning was a long one. For the first three decades of his running career, Spector stuck with marathons (a mere 26.2 miles) and informal trail runs with friends around California’s Muir Beach and Mt. Tamalpais. It wasn’t until he was 60 that Spector tried—and, impressively, finished—his first 50K, a mountainous 31.1-mile course. Still, he says, he didn’t wholeheartedly pursue longer-distance running until, at 64, a broken bone in his leg sidelined him. The shock of injury and his gratitude for recovery jolted Spector to a new level of athleticism: He’d go harder than ever the following year and, he hoped, inspire others in the process.

That’s how Spector, at age 65, came to compete in 10 endurance events, including a 50K, a 129-mile mountain-bike race with 15,000 feet of elevation gain, and an Ironman triathlon. “A real comeback victory,” declared AARP magazine in a story about his feats. The comeback was just the beginning: In 2016, at 69, Spector ran his first 100-mile race, making it 91 miles before heat exhaustion forced him out. Two years later, he became the oldest runner to ever finish the Rio Del Lago 100-mile Endurance Run at age 71. And he kept running after that, too—weathering miles, years, and COVID. Just this summer, at 77, he competed as the oldest runner in the renowned 100-mile Western States Endurance Run.

Today, still interested in inspiring runners and non-runners alike, Spector is writing a book distilling the many fitness, nutrition, and age-relevant training lessons he’s learned on his long journey—a job for which he’s well equipped, he jokes, “because I’ve literally made every mistake in the book.” His working title? Never Stop Running.

Spector’s advice on how to build up resilience like an ultrarunner:

Dream Big
“You’ve got to reach beyond what you’ve done,” Spector says. “Set a goal for something that appeals to you, that challenges you.” The bolder the goal, the better, he says—with the understanding that the more difficult the undertaking, the more setbacks you’ll likely face on your way there. That’s fine, he reasons. “Achieving the goal is less relevant than the process of trying, because the process itself is enlightening. It’s learning about yourself, learning about what you’re capable of doing, and knowing how you can push through what the ultrarunning world calls ‘the pain cave.’”

Know When to Back Off
You have to push yourself, Spector says, but you also have to know when pushing will do more harm than good. In athletics, “it’s unlikely that you won’t get some injury along the way that gets you down,” he says. “But if it’s a minor injury, you can get back from that, sometimes in a very short time. You can even benefit from it.” The real trick, he says, is having the self-awareness and enough control of your ego to take a break. “It doesn’t matter what you’re doing,” he says. “You’ve got to be smart enough to stop if you need to. Because, otherwise, you’ll make the injury worse and have a longer recovery. You might even end your running career.”

Step Back and Talk Yourself Up
Spector, no stranger to setbacks, tells a story about his first Ironman triathlon: He was 65 and swimming in the Sea of Cortez with roughly a thousand other people. The sun was blinding, the waves were big, and then suddenly, “I got thrown on top of somebody; and somebody else landed on top of me.” That could have been it—end of race. Instead, he says, “it was at that moment that I said to myself, ‘You know, I trained for this thing. I’ve got a job to do. I’m not hurt; I need to forget what happened and just get going.’”

Even in the worst moments, he says—and that was one, he acknowledges—you have to be able to step back, out of the moment, to talk to yourself. “You have to believe in the preparation you’ve done and dismiss all that garbage going through your head,” he says. “It’s easier said than done but this is a piece of pushing through that often comes with meaningful challenge.”

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