American women’s basketball coach Karen Aston first had a successful high school and college playing career. She began her coaching career at the high school level before moving to college, where she served first as assistant coach before becoming a college head coach in 2007.
Deena Kastor is a long-distance runner, an Olympic medalist for the marathon, holds American records in both the marathon and half-marathon, and is an eight-time national cross-country champion.
Margaux Isaksen was a world-class competitor in the modern pentathlon, an Olympic sport in which athletes compete in fencing (one-touch épée), freestyle swimming, equestrian show jumping, pistol shooting, and cross-country running. A three-time Olympian, Isaksen first started competing at the international level when she was fifteen.
A nationally known women’s basketball team, the All American Red Heads formed in 1936 in Cassville, Missouri, with Connie Mack Olson as its founder and coach.
Before Connie Dennison passed away in 2018 at the age of 102, the Scot was believed by many to be the world’s oldest yoga teacher.
American National Football League coach
Harriette Thompson ran her first San Diego Marathon when she was 76 and continued doing so every year except 2013—which the then-90-year-old only missed due to a recurrence of the oral cancer she had been fighting since 1986.
Edwina Brocklesby, who would go on to be the U.K.’s oldest Ironman triathlete and founder and director of Silverfit, which promotes physical activity among older people, “didn’t do any exercise at all until I was 50.”
Gladys Burrill was 86 when she ran her first marathon in 2004. She would go on to complete four more Honolulu Marathons, earning the nickname “Gladyator” and setting a world record for the oldest woman to finish a marathon on December 12, 2010 at age 92 with a time of nine hours, 53 minutes and 16 seconds.
In 2024, 55-year-old Amy Appelhans Gubser made headlines like “This Grandmother Swam 30 Miles Through Shark-Infested Waters to Set a Record.”