One 74-Year Old Man's Lessons On How To Adapt To Aging

Glen Betts at the Finish Line. He is way ahead of many 74-year olds on the planet because of a willingness to adapt. Read and find out what Glen does to deal with aging. It will help you in any endeavor.

By Ray Glier

For a few weeks in November and December, Glen Betts, 74, has the sandbox all to himself. He enters a sanctioned indoor track meet and runs a 60, 200, and 400. Glen submits the times to John Seto at www.mastersrankings.com and voila! Betts is ranked No. 1 in the world in the 200 and 400.

November 2024 was the “unofficial” start to the 2025 indoor season, but Glen has not beaten runners from around the world to the “Finish Line” in the 200 and 400 to claim No. 1.

He has beaten them to the “Start Line” because most other elite athletes do not race until January.

He chuckles into the phone.

“It lasts a few weeks,” Betts says about his No. 1 world ranking.

He gets a kids' grin at uprooting the rankings, even though he will soon be back to settling for being No. 9 or No. 10 worldwide in his age group in the 400. Glen will fall in the indoor rankings in the 100 and 200, but will be ranked in the top 15, or so, which is impressive enough considering the thousands of runners worldwide over 70. I'll take No. 9 in the world, wouldn't you?

It shows Betts is out there for a more important reason than ranking, and that reason will be explained at the end of the story.

There is something else that should attract the attention of Geezer Jocks more than Glen's ranking.

It is his mind set and how he going about throwing off the yoke of being "too old". Over 70, he is still willing to change his eating lifestyle and adopt a new training regimen, too.

Keep reading. There is a paragraph further down in story that reveals the ignition switch to change we all can flip.

**

Betts’ embrace of change means he has gotten faster with age because, well, he is lighter. He lost 20 pounds with a diet/lifestyle adjustment.

Second, Glen changed training regimens adopting Tony Holler's Feed The Cats training regimen.

Check out this data:

*In November, 2021 at an indoor meet, Betts ran 34.61 seconds in the 200.
*In November, 2024, just two weeks ago, Glen ran 32.51 seconds in the 200.

He's faster at 74 than he was at 71, which isn't supposed to happen over 70.

Here is the essential background on training about how Glen got unstuck in Masters track.

"I wrote Tony Holler a letter about two years ago and told him 'I'm an old man. You train high school athletes. Do you think your program would work for my age?' " Glen said.

"And he (Holler) came back and said 'I see no reason why it shouldn't'.

"And so I started slowly integrating it and it's so different than the way most sprinters train. At the beginning of spring season 2024 I went full bore on his program and trained only his method. I ran my fastest times since 2019."

Here is Glen on Feed The Cats.

Glen will do Holler’s 10 warmup exercises, which are done fast, like everything else in Feed The Cats. He will pull off his warmups and lace up his spikes and away he goes.

Betts might do the 23-second drill where he runs as hard as he can for 23 seconds and mark a spot with a cone. He will run to that cone as hard as he can three times with a five-minute break between each with the goal of decreasing the time it takes to get to the cone.

On another day, he will do a split 400, which is a 200 meter dash, then a 60-second break, and then another 200. Glen will take eight to 10 minutes for a full recovery and then do another split 400.

“I’m not exhausted, I could go back out there and do it again,” Glen said. “Some days, I might be out there an hour, that's all.”

Here’s another data point about the value of being a change agent.

*In August 2023 at the Michigan Senior Olympics, Glen ran 1 minute, 19.08 seconds in the 400 meters outdoors.

*In July, 2024 at the Pan Am Games in Cleveland, Betts went 1 minute, 10.71 seconds.

In less than a year of lifestyle and training changes, he had taken nine seconds off his time. Think about that as you wonder "how long is my commitment to change going to take." Not as long as you think.

And here’s what ignited Glen to better fitness:

The internet. Glen just studied training methods on-line and settled on one he liked, Feed The Cats. On line we can find expert training on a pickleball serve, how to shoot a basketball better and, of course, how to be more efficient with the golf club. Change is out there for us.

So about Betts' weight loss.

“It was a year ago at Easter time during the beginning of Lent,” Glen said. “One of my closest friends always used to do what we refer to as a Lenten fast where you give something up during the Lenten season.

“That friend passed away and I decided in memory of him, and for my own well- being, I was going to choose something to do for a Lenten fast. I decided to eliminate sweets for the next three months, then all candy, all desserts, ice cream, anything with added sugar on it.”

What started out as a Christian fasting became a lifestyle change. Over nine months, Glen lost 21 pounds.

**

It was uplifting to see Glen stay out there competing at 74, even though he was not hauling in national medals. Some athletes quit competing when they cannot win gold, silver, or bronze in the big meets.

In 2024, Betts finished 25th in the U.S. in the 100 meters outdoors (14.26 seconds) and 15th in the U.S. in 200 outdoors (29.45 seconds). He was 10th in the 400 outdoors (1:10.71).

No national outdoor medals, but he still ran and one of the big reasons was the good will from other athletes at the track.

Glen asked the actor and world-record holder Damien Leake for a photograph together after a particular meet. Glen said he is not in that circle of runners who routinely grab the medals, but it was Leake, the star, who sought out Betts for the photo a few hours later.

“One of the big takeaways for me with Masters athletics is finding out how good you can be,” Betts said. “The other is that I may not be one of the elite athletes, but the really good runners greet me and talk to me, even though I may not even make it to the finals of races with them.

“If you scroll through my photos (on Facebook) you can see me in the photographs with them.”

Glen is smiling in the pictures. When you bet on yourself with change, it's a reason to smile.

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This is why the elite runners want the elite Glen Betts around.