Brightroom photo taken of Walt Washburn in the 2007 Veterans Day 10K in West Potomac Park.

Many runners got their first taste of running in school. Walt Washburn of Vienna, VA got his first tries there too, only he started before World War II. In his sophomore year (1937), his school, Monmouth Academy, started cross-country. Racing was still an oddity and "coaches" were teachers with time on their hands. Running shoes were high top sneakers. Many of the roads were unpaved. This was all before global warming and the winters in Maine were definitely a lot colder. Many of the young athletes did not keep fit, as there were no regular winter sports. When the runners went to meets they traveled along roads that were just as often gravel. By 1939, Washburn was winning so many of his races that he was a regular in the newspaper sports headlines.

After school, there was not as much running and racing going on. Walt slipped into regular life. At five feet seven inches and 125 pounds, he was always light on his feet. They called him "Slim." Today, at age 85, he bemoans the fact that he has "porked out" to 128 pounds.

In the lost years, Walt turned to smoking cigarettes, as did much of America. In the early seventies, his sons, David and Kevin, took up racing in earnest. They got fast very quickly. Dad decided to lace up his shoes again and reemerged as a runner. By 1975, at age 53, he won the grandmasters division at the Lynchburg 10 Miler. Since then he has been an active participant in the road-racing scene. Marie, Walt's wife, has been married to him for 52 years. She used to run when their two sons were in Madison High School in the mid- 1970s.

Walt never did evolve into the mega miles, though he stepped up from 20 miles to near 50 miles a week during his strongest years. For Washburn, those years were his sixties, seventies, and even part of his eighties. He always enjoyed the longer distances. In his first marathon, the February GW Birthday Marathon in Greenbelt, MD, he missed the Boston qualifying time for 40 and over of 3:30:00 by less than two minutes. Undaunted, he went south the following the month and ran the Shamrock in 3:15:00.

By the time he reached his seventies, he was cruising along at about 20 races a year. He had set the Virginia State record (75- 79) for the marathon at Richmond in 1999 with a chip time of 4:16:45. He often visited family in Houston, TX and made their marathon a goal as well. In January 2000 he ran 4:16:21. At age 79, two years later, he ran 4:20:21. The following year he and his son David (46) ran together as he entered his ninth decade. By 2005 Walt was slowing down while his son David, a lawyer, ran a brilliant 2:47:45 for 41st overall. He ran his last Boston Marathon in 2003, lamenting the fact that the highest age group was 70 and over.

In between all that, Walt made American history, setting three age group 80 and over records. First, in January 2003, he ran a small DCRRC race, the Al Lewis 20 Mile, in 3:30:23. Later that year he ran the seldom raced distance of 30K at the Northern Lakes 30K at White Bear Lake (near St. Paul, MN) on May 31. He arrived in town with an infection but, not wanting to waste the trip and junk the race, he ran anyway. He set the American age group record with 3:25:55. By December, he was feeling much better and at the Houstonian Lite 30K broke the record with 3:05:11. The following February, in Alexandria, the DCRRC Belle Haven 25K was the scene of his third American record in 2:45:07.

In 2001 Washburn joined the 50 Plus Club. This club, started in 1997, is for runners, NOT age 50 and older, but runners trying to run 50 (or more) races in a year. Walt was the elder statesman, though the club includes three other runners older than 80. In all, the club has 90 runners past and present. Last year they ran 3600 races and have run 30,000 in their ten-year history. Walt has run nearly 400 of those races. Between the ages of 79 and 83, he ran almost 300 races. At one time, he was the record holder of the club with 28 10K races in a single year.

His PR for the marathon is 3:13, set in his sixties. He ran the first Marine Corps Marathon and then ran it seven more times, as well as the Richmond Marathon six times. His favorite date was the Houston Marathon, which he ran 14 times.

In 2008, Walt has already come out and raced and will probably set a few 85 and over records. Although he always preferred the longer races, nowadays he runs only the shorter ones. He says that in training he could run indefinitely. After two years of one ailment after another, including a blood clot in his right knee that moved up to his lungs, his training now consists of lots of energy building. Now he finds he runs low on energy and falls into the Jeff Galloway method of alternating walking with running. He still does best with fast short intervals rather than just slowing his overall pace. Walt has a regular luncheon meeting with a bunch of octogenarians, such as Bill Osburn, Dixon Hemphill, Paul lackey, Ray Blue, and Bill Morrison. They were all regular competitors throughout the '90s and even into the first five years of this century. All were on top at one time or another. These days Walt and Bill (Osburn) are the only ones still on the trail. Washburn says he is not really beating them these days, just outlasting them.

Washburn does virtually all his running on the W&OD Trail early (6:30) in the morning and he has always been a solitary runner. Still, his name is prominently displayed over the years in the record columns. Last year, Walt had the fastest times for both 80-84 and 85-89 in multiple distances on the Washington Running Report's Best of 2007. That is the weekly updating of the best times in the region found in the results section on www.runwashington.com. Over the years, Walt Washburn has often claimed the title of Age Group winner in the Washington Running Report Runner Rankings.