Episode 48 - Doug Lewis, 62 | Olympian, Ultrarunner, Beginner Again

Forty years after he raced down the Streif at Kitzbuhel, Doug Lewis went back and ran up it.

In August 2026, at sixty-two years old, Doug started the KAT100 by UTMB in Austria - nearly ninety-nine miles through the Kitzbuhel Alps with something close to twenty-eight thousand feet of climbing. A thunderstorm broke over the six o'clock start and the rain ran on for five hours into the night. Fifty-eight miles in, the course sent him up the Hahnenkamm, the mountain he had raced down in a speed suit as a twenty-two-year-old on the US Ski Team. He finished in a little over twenty-nine hours, twenty-third overall, and won the men's sixty to sixty-four category by more than thirteen hours.

He is a two-time Olympian in the alpine downhill - Sarajevo in 1984, Calgary in 1988 - and at the 1985 World Championships in Bormio he became the first American man ever to win a World Championship medal in a speed event. He took two national downhill titles after that. He was five foot eight and a hundred and seventy-five pounds in a sport that rewards size, and he made the Streif, the most dangerous downhill in the world, work for him anyway.

Then he retired at twenty-five and, in his own words, lost his identity. He went from Sports Illustrated to sitting in the back of an introductory economics class as a twenty-six-year-old freshman. What pulled him out was an offer to coach a group of ten- and eleven-year-olds, and that turned into ELITEAM, the conditioning camp he and his wife Kelley have run for thirty-five years. Two hundred and fifty burpees a day. Lights out at nine.

As a ski racer he hated running. The team ran a two-mile fitness test every year and he scraped under the twelve-minute limit every year. Somewhere after he stopped racing, that turned into a question about how far he could go, and the answer has so far been nine hundred-mile finishes and no DNFs.

Doug is the first person who ever found this show on his own and asked to be on it, and this conversation is the one he came for. He talks about going into the dark hole seven or nine or eleven times in a single race and the tools he uses to climb back out. He talks about winning the first Spartan Death Race in 2007 with a peanut butter sandwich and a knife in his pack, and having dinner beforehand with an unknown man named David Goggins. He talks about the night in Italy when he could not stand up straight for the last fifteen miles, and what Kelley said to him afterwards that changed how he saw it. He talks about being frightened - and about the one place he refused to let fear come with him.

There is a quieter thread underneath it too. At sixty-two he has noticed his mobility going, and he is honest about not knowing whether that is age or neglect. He had a full blood workup and a cardiac scan this year because Kelley told him to, and he spends a few minutes asking everyone listening to do the same.

He is sixty-two. He is looking for his tenth hundred-miler - around seventeen thousand feet of climbing, runnable, somewhere beautiful enough to stop and feel lucky - and he would like your suggestions.

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