See Barbara Run…
See Barbara Leap…
See Barbara Jordan Smash World Records!

By Amy Lilly

Barbara Jordan is a petite, compact seventy-year-old who looks like a grandmother in every way – except when she moves.

Finding that she has misplaced a press article written about her, she is suddenly up from the dining room table of her South Burlington home and rifling through papers in the kitchen almost before I can swivel my head around. Nimble is the word that comes to me after a moment of pure surprise.

Jordan is one of the fastest seventy-year-olds in the world, a star in the intensely competitive world of senior track and field. She still holds the World record in the 300 meter hurdles for 65- to 69-year-old women, which she set in 2002. She holds nine American records in three different events: the 60 meter hurdles, the 80 meter hurdles, and the Pentathlon, an event that combines hurdles with high jump, shot put, long jump and an 800 meter run. That nine-to-three ratio means that in each of those events, she has surpassed her own record-setting time at least once. "As I get older, I get better," she smiles.

Last year, she was one of five people around the country to be elected to the United States of America Track and Field (USATF) Masters Hall of Fame. She is now in four halls of fame: the others are her alma mater's, Springfield College in Massachusetts; the Green Mountain Senior Games Hall of Fame; and, most recently, the New England 65-Plus Runner's Club.

Vermont Roots

Jordan moved with her husband Paul, also a graduate of Springfield College, to Vermont in 1969. She has taught physical education at the University of Vermont since 1976, earning a Masters in Education and another in Counseling along the way. She was 56 when she launched what would become an international athletic career by competing in the 1992 Green Mountain Senior Games. Her times easily qualified her for the following year's National Senior Games, known more familiarly as the Senior Olympics.

The Senior Olympics that year was only the fourth ever; it had begun in 1987 and is a biennial event. Jordan first heard about it from two students in the Fitness and Aging class she was teaching at UVM. One of the students, a woman, had learned to do the shot put at 80. But the minimum age for the Senior Olympics was 55 (it is now 50), and Jordan was only in her low fifties at the time. So she began training. After two years, she was ready.

At her first try – the Senior Olympics were in Louisiana that year – she demolished the American record for the high jump and placed second in the long jump. "I was the new kid on the block, so people started saying, 'Who was that?'" The hurdles, her eventual specialty, are not a Senior Games event at either the state or the national level, so Jordan moved on to the major track and field event for seniors, the Masters National and International Championships.

Since then, she has garnered accolades so numerous that her curriculum vitae for competitions alone runs to three pages. She begins our interview by reading aloud from the "Medal Summary" line by line, underscoring each one with her finger while I look on: "Senior Olympics, 1993-2005, five Gold, seven Silver, five Bronze. National Masters Outdoor Championships, 1997-2004, 33 Gold, 12 Silver, three Bronze." She reads the years after the millennium in single digits: two-oh-oh-four.

Incredibly, she has won 35 national championships and 20 international championships in nine different track and field events. She has traveled from South Burlington to Australia, Barbados, Bermuda, England, Puerto Rico and Spain for World Masters Games, International Senior Games, Nike World Games, and World Association for Veteran Athletes Games. Among the "masters" – the USATF designation for athletes over 30, as opposed to "elites" under 30 – she is unquestionably a master.

A Hurdle is a Hurdle is a Hurdle

It is hard to imagine this petite woman with a small tremor in her right hand clearing 30-inch hurdles at breakneck speed around a track. During my short-lived high school track days, I quickly learned to regard hurdles as unforgiving, knee and ankle surgery-inducing obstacles.

Fear, however, seems to play no part in Jordan's outlook. She is serious, slightly reserved, meticulous. She has had her own experience with surgery – a cancerous mass in her breast – and has put it aside. I learn of it only when I ask to read an article that one of her three sons, a sports writer in Maine, wrote about her.

"I told them I didn't want chemotherapy or radiation," she says, and stops. I prod: any pressure from her doctors? "My radiologist understood that I would not be a good candidate for chemo or radiation, because I didn't want it. She understood what kind of person I am." This was ten years ago; the cancer has not returned.

Body and Mind

Jordan's iron spirit carries her through serious training workouts. In addition to teaching fitness classes at the Patrick Gymnasium, three days a week she does two hours of intervals on the track, followed by an hour of weight training, followed by another few hours of hill workouts on the hills behind her house that lead steeply up to Farrell Park. Her coach is Bill Neddle, a retired UVM track coach. She trains regularly with a group of six, one of whom, Flo Meiler from Shelburne, is her current rival in the 300 meter hurdles.

When it rains or snows, Jordan merely descends to her basement, a near showroom of exercise and weight training equipment, each black metal behemoth positioned at exact right angles. In one corner hang her dozens of medals on ribbons in one neat row, flanked by photographs of her with her arms around the waists of other top women athletes, friends she has made at meets over the years.

But there is more to her training than the physical workouts. She has practiced meditation for a half hour each day for years. Jordan believes that learning to exist only in the moment, to "be present" as she puts it, is a key not only to competing successfully in sports, but to living itself. "If you're thinking about the past – rehashing it, feeling guilty or angry – you waste half your life. You waste too much energy living in the past or the future,” she said. With her MS in Counseling, Jordan was able to teach Holistic Health at UVM in addition to her fitness classes.

Records to Break Before I Sleep

To be at the top of this competitive circuit is to know exactly how close you are to setting another American or World record. Now entering the next age category, 70-74, at the bottom, Jordan has the potential to break a new set of records in her specialty. Hurdles World records in that age category are still held by Leonore McDaniels, who is now 78. (McDaniels is one of five top senior women track and field athletes featured in Bill Haney's recent documentary film, Racing Against the Clock.)

Now it's between Jordan and Meiler. "Flo is two years older than me. She does the same events, except she does the pole vault, too. We go head to head in the hurdles; she just broke the world record for 70-74 in the 300 hurdles. That's what I'm going after now. I want that record," Jordan says matter-of-factly. "The first chance I'll have to get that is in North Carolina this summer," at the Masters National Championships.

At the next (hurdle-less) Senior Olympics in Kentucky, June 22-July 8, 2007, Jordan has one goal. "There is only one lady who could beat me in the U.S. in my age group," she says, naming Irene Obera. "She's a great sprinter; she once tried out for the regular Olympics."

But first things first: Jordan will be competing in the Green Mountain Senior Games in Chester on May 20. She is also the coordinator for the Track and Field events this year, so if you'd like to compete, send her your application and $15 by May 12th. Mere spectators can see her do her stuff for the price of a $10 lunch. Or, watch for her on the first leg of the Vermont City Marathon at the end of May; she is one of five women over 60 with grandchildren who make up the long-standing relay team, The Galloping Grannies.

Jordan is still a grandmother, even if she doesn't move like one. She recently gave her oldest granddaughter a set of hurdles for her eleventh birthday. "We set them up at wide intervals, and she and her little sister did great. So we put them closer together. And they still did great!"

No wonder.

Amy Lilly is Associate Editor of Vermont Woman, and lives in Burlington.

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