The Amazing And Admirable Mr. Lebold

Michael Lebold is after his third straight national 800 meters title in Gainesville, Fla., on Feb. 23. His balky left knee is an issue, but as you read about Mike and watch his videos his willpower is so extraordinary he might pull it off. Photo by Rob Jerome.

By Ray Glier

Michael Lebold will disorient many of us. He organizes his life differently than what we see in the mainstream and in our modern U.S. cultural ideology. Mike is an artist and an extraordinary runner for his age who is bending structure.

Lebold, 67, lives in a single room in a Residence Inn in San Diego. He drives a 1992 Toyota Corolla. His personal technology, an MP3 player, cost a modest $39.99. Some kids would insist that piece of tech belongs in a museum.

I know what some of you are thinking. Michael is borderline vagabond.

He’s not. 

Lebold was a Masters national champion in the 800 meters, outdoor and indoor, in 2024 (M65-69). He was part of a world-record 4x800 relay team last summer. I have known a few vagabonds and they don't have the same discipline or ambition to wear gold medals, like Mike.

His freedom, says Mike, is to not be consumed by stuff. Instead, Lebold is consumed by his own energy and by the desire to squeeze every ounce of speed he can out of his body with hellacious workouts.

Lebold is an artist and you look at his work (at the end of the story) and wonder why he has to label himself a “starving artist.” He must lack ambition to get out there and market/sell work that appears to be produced by excellent skills.

That’s not it.

Mike has an underdog’s ambition, but it’s on the track. He is 5-foot-6, 135 pounds and he has tinkered with his stride to match his height to help him run faster Tuesday than he did Monday. He calculated he didn’t have 400 meters speed, so he settled on the 800. Lebold’s ambition is not to amass great wealth, it is to run…

…and run. And run the 800 some more. Lebold did a Spartan Race because he thought it would make him faster. He pressed 500 pounds! with his legs because he thought it would make him faster.

“You just push and push and I keep pushing at something if I think it is going to help me run faster,” he said.

You want ambition? The San Diego Convention Center has the Grand Stairway of 100 steps. Mike would run as hard as he can to the top, two steps at a time. He marked each rep with a piece of chalk at the top to keep track. Lebold has done that 66 times in ONE workout. It took 1 hour, 47 minutes to do the 100 steps 66 times. All through the COVID lockdown, when gyms and schools were closed, Lebold was at the convention center doing those stairs.

It got Mike where he wanted to go. He finished 2024 ranked No. 3 in the U.S. in the 800 with a 2:29.51. 

In addition to the national gold medals in the 800, Lebold was part of a 4x800 world-record relay team with David Westenberg, Tim Owen, and Robert Whitaker last summer at the USATF Masters Outdoor Championships in Sacramento.

Lebold has also won the gold medal in the 800 at the National Senior Games in 2022 and 2023. He went faster in 2024 than he did in 2022 (2:30.45) at the Senior Games.

And now comes his biggest challenge. 

Mike can charge up the landmark B Street Hill in San Diego 36 times in about an hour, twice a week, 100 meters,  but he still doesn’t know if he will be fit enough to run 800 meters February 23 at the USA Track & Field Masters Indoor Championships in Gainesville, Fla?

Did you glance at the 40-second video I linked to? How is he injured?

LeBold says he has some sort of injury to his medial collateral ligament in his left knee that makes flat ground running bothersome. He says Medicare will not pay for an MRI until he has the requisite physical therapy appointments. As a “starving artist”, Michael has to abide the bureaucratic tyranny, or pay out of pocket.

“Mikey” won’t take no for an answer and his body won’t either. The limbs and heart give him the horsepower his mind demands. He does a stationary bike workout (10 times full bore at 2 minutes, 30 seconds, 40 minutes) that leaves a big enough pool of sweat underneath the bike for a puppy to splash in.

“I’m going to try and run in Gainesville,” said Lebold, who will be going for his third consecutive USATF 800 indoor national championship. “I believe that I can do this. And if I can't, I can't, but I got to try. I have to try.”

Does Mike have a genetic variant to stubborn or willpower?

Lebold injured the left knee three months ago with a last-second lunge in a race …for second. He wasn’t going to win the event, but he twisted his shoulder sideway for the lean and the knee twisted, too.

The race was north in Santa Barbara— where he went to college as a steeplechaser —and on the way home when he stopped for gas the knee had swelled.

“I got out of the car and couldn’t stand,” Mike said.

Lebold had gotten back from Colorado five days earlier. It’s where his mom lives and where he does 30 days of running at 8,500 feet.

“I just couldn't mentally accept the fact that I was going to have to rest now; that I did all this work for nothing,” Mike said.

Twenty days later, he ran an 8k.

“It's been three months, and I've had my highs and I've had my lows,” Lebold said. “I've had the times when my knee feels great and I've had times when I can't even get up stairs.

“But I'm strengthening it. I'm working on my cardiovascular on the bike and the elliptical. I'm able to do the hills. I just want to demonstrate one time that I can run on the flat ground, even if I have to do it with a knee brace.”

Our body can do to us what we tell it to do to us. Michael Lebold could be telling his body “make me whole”. His body might have something more reckless in mind, something that could require knee surgery.

The man consumed with ambition just has to throw that card into the middle of the table.

“I just love to do this,” Mike said. “I put music in my ear, and I am out there, and I am just having the time of my life.”

Here is what is really fantastically cool about Lebold’s story.

He will get together with successful college friends and they marvel over him. 

“I just live this super simple life and I always kind of thought of myself as something as a little bit of a failure in that regard,” Mike said. “But my college friends look at me in a whole different light. They admire me. I had no idea that was the case, that they see me as a success. And so now I know.” 

Mike's Styrofoam horse half finished with his dog riding.

And the finished Styrofoam horse. 

A painting by Mike.

This is the day Mike did the San Diego Convention Center steps 66 times.