As a model of successful aging, you can’t beat 82-year-old Juan López García.
Really, you can’t beat him.
Sixteen years ago, at age 66, López García first tried running a mile. He’d recently retired after spending his entire working life as a car mechanic in Toledo, Spain. In all those years, he’d never trained as an athlete or exercised much at all.
He couldn’t finish that first mile. He could barely start it.
Now, at age 82, López García is the world record holder in the 80-to-84 age group for the 50-kilometer (31-mile) ultramarathon. In 2024, he also won the world marathon championship for his age group, with a time of 3:39:10, setting a European record in the process.
His outsize success caught the attention of a group of European scientists who study aging. They invited López García to their lab for extensive testing. Their findings, published in January in Frontiers in Physiology, are, at once, revealing and “inspiring,” said Julian Alcazar, an exercise scientist at the University of Castilla-La Mancha in Spain and a co-author of the study.
The researchers found that López García has the highest aerobic fitness recorded in an octogenarian, matching that of healthy 20-to-30-year-old men. His muscles also absorb and use oxygen unusually well. But in other ways, his biology, biomechanics and training seem relatively ordinary.
Taken as a whole, López García’s physiology and performance in his 80s may help upend some common assumptions about what’s possible and normal as we age, the researchers concluded, including whether it’s ever too late for the rest of us to tackle that first mile.
