Olga Kotelko is a 95-year-old track and field prodigy.

She competes in eleven sports—long jump, high jump, triple jump, shot put, discus, javelin, hammer throw, 100-meter, 200-meter and 400-meter sprints, and the 4 x 100-meter relay.

She holds more than 30 world records and has won more than 750 gold medals in her age category.

At the 2009 World Masters Athletics Championships in Finland, Olga threw a javelin almost twenty feet farther than her closest competitor.

Why is Olga a prodigy? Because she didn’t find her talent for track and field until age 77. And she’s not alone—many Masters Athletes over age 70 start late.

I write about adult late-bloomers (being one myself), but Olga has inspired me to rethink the whole idea. We reserve the word prodigy for the young. But it has much wider meaning.

My favorite definition, from the Oxford English Dictionary, is “an amazing or unusual thing, especially one out of the ordinary course of nature.” Anyone can be a prodigy at any age. And memoir writers, especially, deviate from the ordinary course of nature.

In his book What Makes Olga Run?, Bruce Grierson describes Olga’s ordinary but remarkable life. She was born on a farm in Saskatchewan, one of eleven children. She routinely milked cows at dawn, walked three miles to school, and scrubbed fifteen sets of clothes on a washboard. At age 22, she began teaching grades one through ten in a one-room schoolhouse.

 

At a dance, she met John, a handsome insurance salesman. They soon married. He turned out to be an alcoholic philanderer. In the 1950s, a woman on the Canadian prairie (or anywhere) didn’t just up and leave her husband. Olga stayed for a decade, until, in a drunken rage, John put a knife to her throat.

She fled into the night with her 8-year-old daughter, pregnant with her second child. They jumped a train to Vancouver and ended up at her sister’s doorstep. “As far as I knew,” Olga recalls, “I was the first single mom in the history of the world.”

She lived with her sister for a few years, found a factory job, and studied at night for a teaching credential. She taught school for the next 34 years. When she retired, she played slow-pitch softball, but grew bored. Track and field offered a bigger running-and-throwing challenge.

So at age 77, Olga went looking for a coach.

Several universities have tried to discover Olga’s secret. She’s been stuck with needles, hooked up to electrodes, run over on virtual reality highways.

The studies confirm that something has slowed Olga’s aging process, yet they can’t quite finger what. If exercise is “driving the bus,” as Bruce Grierson puts it, attitude must be the onboard navigator.

Since the publication of What Makes Olga Run?, Olga has become a media darling and a bit of a trickster—that advanced and uncontrollable old woman Dorothy Sayers so admires. When asked, “What’s your secret?” she gives a different answer every time:

“I don’t allow people to have a negative effect on me.”

“I have a little bit of scotch now and then.”

“Enjoy life!”

After following Olga for four years, Bruce Grierson thinks he has figured it out:

 

 

Keep moving. Create routines (but sometimes break them). Believe in something. Lighten up. Begin now.

 

These strategies can also apply to writing, especially memoir writing:

1. Keep Moving. Any block, creative or otherwise, can be solved with movement. When we move, our bodies and brains become dance partners. Take a walk outside, let your hand flow across a piece of paper, do one then the other—just keep moving.

2. Create Routines (But Sometimes Break Them).  Our bodies crave routine. It frees our minds for storytelling and problem-solving. But if we occasionally break routine, we jolt our bodies and brains out of lazy shortcuts and force them to adapt. How can you apply this idea to your writing style and schedule?

3. Believe in Something. It doesn’t matter what. Olga is devoutly religious, but she also believes in the wonders of massage and reflexology. As psychologist James Fowler notes, belief is a trait marked by “the tendency to embrace puzzles, to see life’s dark spots as necessary tasks.”

4. Lighten Up. What did I mean by “memoir writers deviate from the ordinary course of nature”? If your life stays the course, you won’t write a memoir. As some point, you must navigate a deep, dark sea of stress, like Olga fleeing across a continent at night. Your memoir will arise from its depths. But stress hides in muscle and in memory. Self-care and exercise can help you “lighten up” and write through it.

5. Begin Now. Here’s Bruce Grierson’s observation about boomers: “We’re rested, we’re restless, we’re ready.” A perfect prescription for writing memoir.

At the risk of sounding cliché, it’s never too late to become a prodigy, an amazing unusual thing out of the ordinary course of nature, an advanced and uncontrollable old woman (or man). Why even try?

As Olga Kotelko says, “To inspire, that’s the name of the game.” And of course, she walks her talk.

At 95, she just finished her memoir.

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Thank you for introducing us to Olga and her remarkable story, Debra. Olga, you are a role model and inspiration for all of us. You show us with style and grace how age is in our mind. It’s never too late to fulfill our dreams. Thank you!

Bio:

Debra Eve is a nonfiction writer who blogs about creativity and positive aging at Later Bloomer. You can find her most popular essays on Kindle. She also holds an MA in Anthropology from UCLA, where she was the last assistant to archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, a colleague of Joseph Campbell. She helped bring Dr. Gimbutas’s final book, The Living Goddesses, to print. She is also the assistant managing editor of the online literary journal, Compose.

Debra’s current work-in-progress explores the intersection of archaeology and storytelling. She lives in Los Angeles with her British husband and two 25 lb Maine Coon cats.

Links:

Blog: http://laterbloomer.com

Facebook: http://facebook.com/laterbloomers

Twitter: http://twitter.com/debraeve

Later Bloomers on Kindle: http://amzn.com/B0066IG7PC

What Makes Olga Run? By Bruce Grierson: http://amzn.com/B00EMTG0O0

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Olga’s memoir, Olga: The O.K. Way to a Happy, Healthy Life was published on April 25, 2014 and is available on Amazon.

 

How about you? Have you ever thought it’s too late to pursue your dreams? What do you think about Olga’s story?

 

We’d love to hear from you. Please leave your comments below~