Hal Higdon is the 90-Year-Old King of Training Plans

“I don’t think I could have predicted my life at any point,” he said, speaking with the enthusiasm of someone who has never come down from a runner’s high. “I went with the flow. I had the intelligence I absorbed over decades of time, particularly for the kind of person who had no idea that he or she would become a runner.”

In 1993, he wrote “Marathon: The Ultimate Training Guide,” now in its fifth edition. He registered for a website in 1994, the same year Oprah Winfrey famously ran the Marine Corps Marathon. Running had hit a new mainstream fever pitch.

The Higdon family — three children and nine grandchildren — had been training for what was to come. Higdon began naming some of his family members: Jake (or, as Higdon called him, grandchild No. 5) and Jake’s father, David, helped get the website up to date. His granddaughter Sophie dove into Instagram. He started talking about his son Kevin’s role, before cutting himself off, worried he would not give everyone equal credit in the family business.

“Without leaving anybody out, all the family is involved,” he said. “It may as well be called the Hal Higdon team legacy.”

Jake estimated that about 2 million people used the training plans online every year. More recently, the site added two programs — TrainingPeaks and a RunwithHal app — that are subscription based. But, Jake added, it was a total non-starter to ever pull any programs off the website. More than 90 percent of runners only use the free plans.

“He has never been in it to make a ton of money,” he said. “Putting that barrier up would really fly in the face of trying to reach runners of all levels.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/18/sports/Hal-Higdon-Training.html