Rice, who ran a world record in the marathon in the 75-79 age group last year, has an incredibly high V02 max.

Zack Wittman

At 77 years old, Jeannie Rice is still setting age group world records and altering what we thought we knew about aging and running.

She currently owns the world record for every distance between the 1500 meters and the marathon.

It’s not just that Rice is fast for her age—and just plain speedy, full stop.

She’s also not seeing the decline in speed you’d typically expect for a septuagenarian runner.

That’s why, when U.K.-based researchers learned that Rice would be racing the London Marathon last April, they pounced on the opportunity to study what biomarkers and physical characteristics set her apart from her peers.

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Six days after she set a new age-group world record in the marathon, running a time of 3:33:27 (averaging 8:08 miles), Rice agreed to visit an exercise lab in England where she underwent body fat measuring, treadmill testing, and other running and jumping assessments.

In the resulting case report, which was published earlier this year in the Journal of Applied Physiology, the authors shared that Rice has the highest V02 max (47.8) ever recorded for a woman aged 75 years or older, and a surprisingly high max heart rate of 180.

“I’m just a normal, average person,” Rice insisted in a phone call with Runner’s World a few days after racing the 2025 Tokyo Marathon. “I’m not any different than anybody.

I don’t do anything different, I’m just lucky and I’m blessed, you know,” she continued.

However, she added that she regularly runs with friends who are 40-50 years old.

“I forget how old I am, because physically, I can keep up with that,” she said.

Her very high VO2 max is comparable to that of world-class female and male distance runners who are several decades younger, and what’s been reported in male masters world-record holders. Rice’s running economy (RE), however, was found to be relatively modest for a runner of her ability.

“That’s the same path to success that worked for Joan Benoit Samuelson,” wrote Amby Burfoot—who has written about Rice and known her for several years and connected her to the physiologists conducting the study in London—in a Facebook post.

“The very high VO2 max found may explain why the present athlete was able to achieve world-class performances across a wide range of distances (1,500 m – marathon),” the study authors wrote, “as VO2 max is highly important across all middle/long distances, whereas the importance of RE increases with longer running distances.”

Trying to make sense of their findings, they wrote that there could be something to the fact that Rice has only experienced one running injury over the course of her 36-year running career, a metatarsal fracture that occurred when she stepped on a rock, about five months after completing lab testing for the study.

“Her resilience to running injuries has likely contributed to her world-class age-group performance,” they wrote, “As continuous years of running training has been suggested to be particularly essential for aging athletes.

This seems to be due to a possibly more rapid decrease in physiological parameters with prolonged rest (e.g., due to injury) in older individuals, and subsequent reduced response to training as compared with younger individuals observed in some studies.”

In other words, her ability to remain consistent has been something of a superpower.

If you don’t get injured, you can continue improving and stacking one progressive training block on top of another.

There’s no starting over or rebuilding required, just steady momentum.

Rice is known for her humble nature, and she demurs about the possibility that she’s physiologically special.

Her parents were healthy and active, but not impressive athletes.

Sometimes when consistent hard work has become so natural to someone, they don’t think of it as anything extraordinary, but as Rice said, “If I didn’t train, I wouldn’t be where I am. Training is 50 percent of it.”

She’s been running 50 miles per week year round for the past 40 years—keeping her easy days easy, and not typically going for her maximum effort during her thrice weekly interval sessions—and only began accomplishing world-record performances when she entered the 70-74 year-old age category, so the study authors theorize that the training adaptations from all those years of high volume running likely played a major role in her current performances.

That, and eating healthy and balanced meals, hydrating well, and keeping her mind strong.

“So I put a lot of miles on my body, and my body probably is like, ‘Oh, this is what I do. This is what we do,’” Rice says.

Study authors Bas van Hooren and Michele Zanini suggest that the RE measure may have been affected by the marathon she’d just raced.

Rice reported feeling fully recovered at the time of testing, so that could suggest that the impact of racing the marathon was relatively small on the study’s outcomes, but it’s probable that it played at least some role.

Regardless, the results indicate that her world-class performances “may be primarily attributed to a high VO2 max rather than an exceptional RE,” the study says.

Van Hooren and Zanini gave two possible explanations for Rice’s relatively modest RE at submaximal running speeds—her weekly training distance and her stature.

The male masters marathon world-record holder with a more remarkable RE typically ran 83-87 miles per week in the two years leading up to his world record, whereas Rice says she typically runs around 50 weekly miles, with a maximum of 68 miles in the weeks leading up to her world record at the London Marathon.

Her mileage is comparable with a former world-class male middle distance runner who showed similar RE values, potentially making the case that a lower volume of weekly miles could lead to smaller adaptations enhancing RE.

Then, because Rice is relatively short, she required a relatively high step frequency at all speeds throughout the lab tests.

And her high step frequency “may increase the cost of leg swing, thereby increasing the energy cost of running.”

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This case report brings up at least as many questions as it answers, but the researchers gained so much valuable data from Rice, and perhaps it will lead to more testing in this vein.

As they acknowledged, studies including world-class masters athletes are rare, and ones that include women are even rarer.

And yet, these studies have potential implications for the general population, and are in turn, a public good.

“The study of master athletes, particularly at the world-class level,” they write, “can provide essential insights into the ability of humans to maintain a cardiorespiratory fitness with advancing age without the confounding effect of reduced physical activity, and on the training practices eliciting such maintenance.”

One of the most illuminating takeaways was the possible suggestion that, based on Rice’s stats and her long term training habits, VO2 max might be maintained as age progresses by running relatively high mileage without a particularly heavy emphasis on high intensity exercise.

The way Rice sees it, she’s just happy to keep running, competing, and working towards her personal goals, and she believes that one of these days, it’s just a matter of time until somebody new comes along and starts breaking her records. Let there be more Jeannie Rices.

Younger women often approach her at races and ask to take a photo with her.

“And you know, it’s wonderful,” she says, “because they think I’m doing well because of my age. I’m trying to motivate them, be an inspiration for them.

They don’t know me personally, but they think, ‘If she can do it, maybe we could do it.’ That’s what I want them to think.”