Episode 47 - Jeff Stafford | The Last Annual Podcast Series Pt. 3, HOTS at 69

He spent twenty-six years in the Army running two to four miles a day at somebody else's pace, and when he retired he decided he was finished with running for good. He sat on the couch for about a decade.

He was fifty-six when he asked his wife to walk around the block with him. He started running ahead to the stop signs and jogging back to her. After a few weeks she told him to stop waiting and just go.

Jeff Stafford is sixty-nine years old. This June he finished the Last Annual Heart of the South — three hundred fifty-five miles across the American South, eight days and two hours, fourth overall. He was the oldest finisher in the sixty-to-sixty-nine age group. Thirteen runners that age started the race. Six of them finished.

The Heart of the South is Lazarus Lake's journey run. You leave your car in a field in Georgia, get on a bus, and nobody tells you where it's going. The route arrives on your phone the night before. Then you walk home. No aid stations, no crew, no pacers. You resupply at gas stations and Dollar Generals and you sleep where you can.

Before any of that, Jeff flew helicopters. Fifteen years in UH-1 Hueys, then Little Birds with the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, carrying Rangers and Delta and SEAL Team Six to places nobody talks about. He retired in 2001, two months before September eleventh. He is the best explanation this show has yet found for why so many of these runners come out of that world: the no-fail mission. Everything is training until suddenly it isn't, and then the only acceptable outcome is finishing. As he puts it, the DNFs that hurt are the ones where you failed yourself.

Tim Hardy is back in the chair as guest co-host — the two of them met on the road at Vol State in 2019 and recognized each other as Army before either said so.

They cover a lot of ground. The first hundred-miler, which came after a DNF at mile sixty-eight. Five Strolling Jims and three sub-seven shirts. Old Dominion with fourteen minutes to spare. Big Barkley in 2024. Why he prefers the Heart of the South to Vol State, and why he volunteers at Vol State anyway — taking finishers' photographs at the Rock and driving people who can't drive themselves up and down the mountain all night.

And two stories from this June that don't sound like ultrarunning at all. The morning he crossed Atlanta on the MARTA train, exhausted, knowing nothing about public transit, and simply asked the first local he saw for help — while other runners in the same race lost six hours because they wouldn't. And the elderly man with the white beard and the one cloudy eye who nodded at him on that train, and then turned up again the next day, a hundred miles west, in a McDonald's.

Near the end Mark makes him an argument. Jeff turns seventy shortly after the new year. Attrition thins the seventy-to-seventy-nine group to almost nothing, and Jeff hasn't slowed much. Those records are sitting there.

Jeff's own goal is different, and he says it plainly: he wants to be the oldest person ever to officially start the Barkley Marathons.

For the full video conversation, head to the Run Long After 60 YouTube channel and subscribe.