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Chris Hickey, 63, is disciplined. That's part of the reason he got faster in his 60s. What else went into it? It's not as hard as you think. Please read for 4 minutes.
By Ray Glier
When Chris Hickey was 53 years old he ran an indoors 200-meter race in 29.2 seconds.
Then he ran the 200 indoors in 27.75 seconds….
….10 years later.
He was almost two seconds faster. Not a year later. Not five years later. Ten years later.
Sounds like Chris snuck into Enhanced Games training and got some of the gym candy, gear, stackers, or fertilizer the millionaires were passing out to select athletes.
It wasn’t performance enhancing drugs. After reviewing data Chris sent him, a friend from the Naval Academy, a physical therapist, called Hickey and semi-scolded him. “Chris,” said Marius Jones, “you have no idea how stronger you can get.”
That goes for many of us when it comes to unused potential. Our limits are self-imposed.
**
Chris, 63, did indeed get stronger. His friend got him into kettlebell workouts the last eight years. You have probably walked right past these cannonballs with a handle in the gym for years.
“He wanted me to break my paradigm and for me to think, ‘Hey, you really can get stronger’,” Hickey said. “There are no limits."
Hickey ran that 27.75 in the 200 in the 2026 USATF Masters Indoor Championships in Albuquerque in February. He is quick to say the high altitude in Albuquerque and the lightning fast track had something to do with the 27.75, which was his fastest 200 since a race in Boston when he was 51 (26.88).
But Chris had more to do with his performance than the track or altitude. It’s why he is primed to be competitive this weekend in the USATF Masters Outdoor Championships in Geneva, Ohio, where he will compete in the 100, 200, and 300 hurdles (M60-64).
**
Hickey is not a maniacal trainer with the kettlebells. A former intelligence man for the U.S. government, he is not trying to duel Masters superstars for No. 1 in the world with 24/7 workouts. His kettlebell routine takes 1 hour 15 minutes, including warm-up and cool down. Chris’s wife, Beth, even said one day when he came home from a workout, “You weren't at the gym very long.”
Hickey says, “I do a warm up. Five exercises. I do a cool down. I'm done.”
Then he says the magic word.
Consistency.
“I always say it is a consistent strength training program and the key word is consistent,” Hickey said of his surge in the sport. “If you're consistent, you will get results. You will feel better, and it will enable you to do what you want to do. It's a building block. It’s the bottom of the pyramid.
“You're not in your 50s anymore. You need to do strength training. There's no way around it. You want to do X, then you need to you need the strength training.”
Chris has just the 12th best time of any of the men (M60-64) starting the 200 at this weekends championships. In his favorite race, the 300 hurdles, Hickey has the fifth best time (50.69 seconds).
12th and 5th are not the point, of course.
The point is a wholehearted leap into kettlebells as part of his workouts as a way to stay competitive, relevant, and keep it fun.
Chris is in the gym three days a week and does four or five exercises a session. He doesn’t lift more than 10 reps in a session per exercise, which may be two sets of five, or a set of six and set of four, but no more than 10.
His regimen includes kettlebell single arm swings, seated calf raises, single Romanian deadlift, a row exercise with a kettlebell where he is bent at the waist, among others.
Kettlebell workouts are typically multiple joints/multiple muscle groups.
And once a week Hickey will train in the pool, 14-18 minutes of actual running in water after a suitable warmup.
Here are important takeaways for running faster in your 60s than you did in your 50s:
*The kettlebell workouts, he said, "have hardened that kinetic chain from the glutes, the hands, the quads, and I think the calves, to some degree." It's all on a string.
*He has strength to use the starting blocks again. With the kettlebell exercises, all start in a knee bent position, and you straighten up, similar to a start in the blocks. In a typical kettlebell workout, Hickey may do 30 to 40 reps of that motion.
*Finishing power. In the hurdles and 200, Chris can maintain running form and a key to those races is keeping your running form as efficient as possible to the finish line.
His improved strength means Hickey has deprived his family for a decade, at least, of their tease of wanting “a vomit report”. He can be wasted at the finish and on his knees, but no more vomiting.
A couple of other notes.
The hurdles he jumps at full run are 30 inches high. Go take a 63-year old guy off the street and ask them to do that race over 300 meters. It would be impossible for 95 percent of men 63.
One thing Chris does as well as the best in the world is his recovery regimen after a race.
*He walks until he can get his heart rate under 120.
*He does a yoga pose “legs up the wall” for three to five minutes, longer if he can.
*He does a series of five stretches.
*He uses the roller for his legs, a staple for 14 years.
When Hickey ran the 27.75 200 in February this year he noticed he had a little belly. And that’s the point. Chris is 5-foot-9, 181 pounds. He is not a beast. He is just a guy, but a guy with discipline and plan....and consistency.
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