Aging ever so gracefully at age 59 and forging a career record that becomes ever more impressive, Sharon Vos is named Ujena Fit Club Female Runner of the Year still again.

by David Prokop, Editor, Best Road Races

For the third year in a row, the Ujena Fit Club Female Runner of the Year is Sharon Vos of Greenwich, Conn., one of the Rouse triplets (their maiden name) – Shelley, Honor and Sharon – who have run faster in the marathon than any triplets in history.  

Clearly, three is a number of more than passing significance to Sharon, and winning the Ujena Fit Club Runner of the Year award for the third year in a row is getting to be a habit – a very nice one! – as is her long-term involvement in running and racing.

In 2013 Sharon ran 33 races totaling 284 miles in distance, which gave her 23,038 points based on the formula used for the Ujena Fit Club men’s and women’s rankings – 100 points for each race posted (with finish time included), 20 points for each mile raced, and performance points – from 300 down to one – for any and all age-graded percentages ranking in the top 300 for the year! 

In that regard, Sharon Vos truly has the whole package: She not only runs a lot of races, she runs them very well. Since she joined the Ujena Fit Club in 2008, she’s run 25 races or more each year and there’s not a single race she’s posted that’s not 80 percent age-graded, which is national class. Ninety percent is international class – and last year Sharon actually exceeded 95 percent in the two marathons she ran!

She ran 3:08:32 in the London Marathon on April 21 at age 58, which translated to a 95.16 age-graded score. It was the 40^th marathon she had completed during her now illustrious running career.

At the ING New York City on November 3, she ran 3:09:40 at age 59, having celebrated her birthday only two days before, and her age-graded score was even higher -- 95.98!

These were the highest age-graded scores she has ever achieved – and the way her running career is evolving (the older she gets, the better she seems to run compared to her peers), it would seem a fairly safe bet that she has even higher age-graded scores in her future.

An analysis of Sharon’s racing schedule over the past few years reveals that she runs two marathons a year – e.g., Boston and Chicago in 2012, London and New York in 2013. This is totally by design, in case you’re wondering.

“I typically aim for a spring and a fall marathon,” Sharon explains. “There’s a bit of a reason for it – the spring marathon gets me through the winter (providing motivation for training in the cold) and the fall marathon … I’m deep down a marathoner at heart, I like training in the summer, so I’ve just always run a fall marathon. That’s how I first started running the marathon – I first ran New York in the fall of 1985.”

With the two yearly marathons as her main focus, Sharon builds her training and racing schedule around that. She says, “I use some of the shorter races as my speedwork and some of the longer races as my tempo runs. I love to race.”

Indeed, as she gets older it seems she likes to race more often.

“I don’t know if it’s that per se,” she responds. “When I was younger, I did more speedwork on the weekends. Now I run more races and I use those races as speedwork.”

Two of the reasons why she can run so many races so well is that 1) She doesn’t put as much pressure on herself as she used to, and 2) She seems to be injury proof, whereas many runners, especially as the years and miles of running accumulate, become injury prone.

Sharon addresses the former point: “When I was just starting out in racing I would worry about everything – the course, the weather, how I was going to do in the race. I’m not as hung up about it now – I still run each race hard, but now I sort of take things more in stride. Because of that, I do recover pretty quickly. I get less stressed. Some races I do get stressed about, but others I don’t, and that’s also why I can do so many races.”

Commenting on her – knock on wood! – ability to avoid injury, Sharon says, “Some of it is my running style. I’m sort of a mid- to forefoot runner. I’m a relatively efficient, neutral runner – I don’t pronate at all, I’m relatively light on my feet. My two sisters are more on their toes when they run. I’m more of a ball of the foot runner – more forefoot. Also, I’ve never run mega miles in training and I think that has helped me avoid injury.”

Sharon typically runs 45-50 miles a week – only rarely does she exceed that mileage.

“I am not a sophisticated trainer,” she says, “I just basically run. I more or less do what I did the year before – if it works. I look at what I did last year, see if it works and repeat it. I don’t spend the whole day thinking what I’m going to do in a workout; I don’t have time for that.

“I know if I was more serious about my training, if I did cross-training, worked out in a gym, was more sophisticated in my running training, I might be faster. But that’s not the way I am. I don’t belong to a gym. I keep it simple – and simple works for me.”

Of course, staying healthy and injury free is a huge part of running well and enjoying a long, successful career – the kind Sharon has enjoyed. Just ask her sister Honor, whom Sharon regards as the most talented of the triplets. “She got very good very fast,” Sharon says, but Honor has been nowhere near as fortunate in remaining injury free – she’s been seriously hampered by nagging foot problems the last few years.

For the record, Honor, who’s named after the triplets’ mother, now 95 and living in an assisted living home in San Jose, Calif., has the fastest PR’s of the three sisters – including a 2:44 marathon – and she’s the only one of the three who has competed in the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials for women. Honor now lives in Los Gatos, Calif., and Shelley lives in San Jose. Since Sharon’s youngest daughter, Sophie, now works for Stryker, a medical corporation in the San Jose area (Sharon’s other daughter, Jennifer, works at Fordham University in New York City), it means that Sharon’s entire family, other than her husband and daughter Jennifer, live in California.

Congrats Sharon on three in a row. Ujena Fit Club Female runner of the year (2013). You are amazing. Congrats!
Bob Anderson 3/23/14 11:03 pm

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The remarkable Rouse sisters are identical triplets, they’re basically the same height and weight (Sharon is 5’4½”, 110 pounds), and they’ve all excelled as runners – their marathon PR’s (Honor Fetherston, 2:44:36, Sharon Vos, 2:57:30, Shelley Sumner, 2:58:12) are the fastest ever recorded by triplets. Although they came to running totally separately and independently, they’ve had a positive influence on each other’s running careers, if only by serving as an example each to the other. Sharon, for one, has drawn tremendous inspiration from her sisters and isn’t hesitant to talk about it.

Photo: Sharon with daughter Jennifer

“Seeing (Honor’s) impressive progress (when I was first starting out in running), I thought, ‘We’re identical triplets, maybe I can improve a lot, too.’ I knew I couldn’t be as fast as she was at that point in time, but I thought, because of her accomplishments, there was something I could aspire to that was well beyond what I was doing.

“Later I would gain tremendous inspiration from my sister, Shelley, in seeing how courageously she handled such great adversity in her life when she lost her husband, Stan, to cancer, and subsequently her oldest son, Ben, who was killed in a freak skiing accident at Lake Tahoe, even though he was a fine skier. Facing the kind of adversity you do in a race, even one as demanding as a marathon, seemed quite minor compared to what she had to endure.”

Could it be that what we’re seeing in these Sisters Three is the female variation of The Right Stuff, which writer Tom Wolfe used as the title of his 1979 bestseller by that name, describing the code and character of military test pilots? After all, the father of the girls, John Rouse, was a General in the U.S. Air Force. A bomber pilot in the Pacific theater during World War II, when he later achieved the rank of General, he was the commander at various Air Force bases, and at one time he was even head of NORAD for the western sector of the United States. It was a huge responsibility because NORAD, which stands for Northern Air Defense, was the organization charged with protecting America from missile attack. 

General Rouse, who passed away seven years ago at age 90, met Honor Norman in Australia during the war, they had a brief courtship, then they got married and John Rouse brought his Australian bride to America. In addition to the triplets, who were born in Phoenix, Ariz., on Nov. 1, 1954, they had a son, John, who’s four years older than the girls and a professor of Theater Arts at the University of California, San Diego.

“Both of our parents were very loving,” Sharon has said. “They always encouraged us to do our best, but without pushing. We never felt any pressure. They were not pushy parents. There is a great difference between encouraging you to do the best that you can do and pushing you to be the best. You don’t need to be the best to do your best.

“My sisters and I were all good students, we’ve all been happily married, we’ve all been successful in athletics. We owe that to our parents. They really instilled the right values in all of us.”

Relying on those values and the passion she still feels for running, almost 30 years after she first got started, Sharon had a year to remember in 2013. Her two marathons – and those were hardly her only good races – were superb efforts, as reflected by her age-graded scores! The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus said, “Big results require big ambitions.” Sharon Vos, less than eight months away from her 60^th birthday, explains her ambitions in the marathon today: “My goal (now) is always under 3:10. My goal used to be under three hours, now it’s under 3:10 – and last year I was very fortunate (to achieve that goal in both marathons). New York was very windy and I was pleasantly surprised to run that fast.”

Her times in London and New York were remarkably similar – 3:08:32 and 3:09:40 – but Sharon says the races were totally different.

“In London I didn’t think I was going to run that fast. I started with the 3:45 group and then when the runners funneled together after that unusual start they have in London, I had to pick my way through a lot of people. But I was running well, the course was flat, fast and beautiful, and I was able to run a good time.

“New York was a more challenging course and it was windy. But it was my day, what can I say? I think I ran better in New York – the course was tougher and it was windy.”

When you speak to Sharon Vos about running, it becomes readily and immediately apparent she loves it on a level that can only be described as visceral, and it’s natural to wonder if she enjoys running and racing more now than ever before.

“I actually find it continually changes,” Sharon explains. “It started out for me getting used to running and starting to race. Then as I found out I had some ability, I became very focused on training and racing – this was in my late 30s and early 40s, because I started running in my early 30s. Then it became more of a combination to see how I was as a competitor in age-group competition and staying fit – and between all that I’m raising two kids. So all that time I was as serious as I could be while still putting my children first. For me now, it’s definitely a combination of age-group competition and  the age-graded percentages, which is something I never looked out for before. I like to find out how I’m doing in the age-graded scoring. So all this keeps me running, which is also a social experience for me  – there are a lot of people I like that I see over and over again at races. And I still like the challenge and the physical well-being running gives me. I like to run.”

Probably Sharon’s greatest supporter in her now rather extraordinary running career is her husband Joost  (pronounced “Yost” like “most”), a longtime runner himself who used to work on Wall Street and now is a financial advisor with Morgan Stanley in Purchase, N.Y., which is just down the road from Greenwich, Conn. 

Explaining Sharon’s successful and long running and racing career, he says, “I just think that she’s been able to maintain a training regimen and a level of motivation to do these things. At that age you have to really like doing this to stay at that level. I gave up marathoning 17 years ago – 1997. She’s still doing it, and she’s been very fortunate her body has held up.”    

A former speedskater in his native Holland, Joost and Sharon started running together shortly after they got married in the early ‘80s (they met when Sharon was an exchange student at Nijenrode University in Holland). In fact, Joost used to beat Sharon in the shorter races, although he could never quite keep up with her in the marathon – “I was a better long-distance runner,” Sharon says. Joost, who has run nine marathons, still exercises for fitness – he runs up to an hour at a leisurely pace and, as a member of a recreational cycling club, does 100-mile bike rides several times a year. A pleasant man with a great sense of humor, he supports Sharon totally in her running and racing efforts, but keeps his pride in her accomplishments somewhat under wraps.

“I’m not showing it,” he quips, “because I don’t want her head to get too big,” 

Nevertheless, for Sharon to be running that fast at that age is impressive any way you look at it!

“I agree,” says Joost. “She does it because she enjoys it. Not for any other reason.”

This year Sharon Vos will run the Boston Marathon in April, and on November 1, the  day before the New York City Marathon, she will turn 60! She’ll be on the starting line in New York, and she hopes to win the 60-64 age division for women -- just to start her next decade off right!