If Olga Kotelko tells you sleep is one of the keys to a long and healthy life, you’d better listen.
“You actually woke me up when you called — I dozed off reading the newspaper,” the 91-year-old Vonda native said from her Vancouver-area home this week.
The mid-afternoon nap was well-deserved. Kotelko has just returned from one of her three weekly aquafit classes. This session apparently wasn’t challenging enough, so she held a pair of dumbells during the exercises.
“That is tiring. It’s hard to move those weights under the water,” she said.
Her busy training plan also includes regular 90-minute stretching sessions and visits to the local track. For further exercise, she tends to a large garden and is in a 10-pin bowling league. Kotelko is attracting the attention of athletes, scientists and sports fans around the world.
A woman her age has never run so fast, jumped so high or thrown so far. She owns every athletics world record in her age group, a dizzying array of more than a dozen events ranging from the sprints to hammer throw to triple jump. She’s not going to the Olympics any time soon, but her 100-metre time of 23 seconds would place her ahead of many middle-aged men.
With no injuries or serious illness, and a burning desire to improve on her records, she’s planning to attend the national indoor track championships in Kamloops in March and several other local meets.
“Of course I am going to,” she said.
“I have no plans to stop. Why would I?”
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Kotelko was the seventh of 11 children born to Ukrainian immigrant farmers Wasyl and Ann Shawaga. The family farmed 50 kilometres northeast of Vonda. She taught for several years at local schools. Having discovered that she “married not the right man,” Kotelko, who was five months pregnant, took her eight-year-old daughter and moved to Vancouver. She raised the daughters alone, teaching and never re-marrying.
Kotelko took up track and field at age 77 on the suggestion of a friend, and has been re-writing the record books ever since. She lives with her eldest daughter in their Vancouver-area home; her younger daughter died several years ago. Kotelko maintains the large family garden and tries to spend time outside every day. She returns periodically to Saskatoon for funerals, reunions or to visit her lone surviving sibling, 87-year-old Phyliss Gutiw.
Kotelko said she’s often asked about the secret to her longevity and unprecedented fitness levels, and is happy to respond.
She is careful but not obsessive about her diet. She sleeps eight hours a day, with the odd nap. She’s never smoked and has only “the odd scotch or glass of wine, for medicinal purposes, of course.”
And, most important of all, she said, she stays active.
“I am careful about how much I do, but I thank God I have good health. I feel very good,” she said.
“I want people to know that if you take care of yourself, 60, 70, 80, 90 is nothing.”
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The peak of her outdoor track season will be the masters world championships in Sacramento, Calif. She hopes to retain all of her world titles and smash at least some of her records. It might include another guest spot on a relay team.
At the last world championships in Finland, there weren’t enough 90-year-old Canadian women to form a team, so she raced the 4 x 100-metre and 4 x 400-metre relays with the 80-year-olds. The result? Two more gold medals and a 4 x 100-metre world record.
Her other goal for the coming year is to improve on her bowling average, which she said is somewhere in the 140s. She insists on hurling down the lane the same five-kilogram ball she bought at age 40.
“Everything I do I want to succeed,” she said.
Several minutes after the telephone interview, Kotelko calls back to add one final point.
“I am not an old woman. I have become a young at heart athlete.”
For a gallery of 91-year-old record holders Olga Kotelko and Chris Daly see http://www.theStarPhoenix.com/
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