Before carbon-plated running shoes, before compression socks and gel packets, before fancy watches and Strava and those vest-water-bottle-holder gizmos, Sharlet Gilbert knew she was fast.
“I took the [Presidential Fitness] test at De Anza High School around some basketball courts, and I was the second-fastest girl in the school,” Gilbert told Richmondside. “I thought, ‘Oh, this is pretty nice.’ ”
Now, 55 years later, Gilbert hasn’t slowed down much. She’s an assistant track coach at Hercules High School and a decorated marathon runner. Racing in Japan, New York and San Francisco, Gilbert, a 73-year-old lifelong Richmond area resident, is still out there running. The Greenridge Heights neighborhood resident has come back from stress fractures, shattered heels, and a traumatic brain injury, and now, she said, she’s determined to savor and protect her youthfulness, nested in a steadily aging body.
“If you don’t keep going, you just start deteriorating,” she said. “I’m going to die if I don’t keep moving.”
Sharlet Gilbert ran her first college track meet at 50
Richmondside interviewed Gilbert and her sister, Karen Folks, 68, of Castro Valley, also a distance runner, in Richmond’s Kennedy Grove park on a recent sunny afternoon. The two of them train on the park’s tree-lined paths, or at the nearby San Pablo Reservoir Recreation Area.
Meet Your Neighbor
Who: Sharlet Gilbert, renown runner and an assistant track coach at Hercules High School.
Neighborhood: Gilbert, 73, was born in San Pablo and now lives in Greenridge Heights.
Richmond area resident for: Most of her life.
She said: “If you don’t keep going, you just start deteriorating. I’m going to die if I don’t keep moving.”
Richmond is home to 40+ distinct neighborhoods, a fact that some residents have told us makes them feel disconnected to the city as a whole. This story is part of an occasional series to help Richmonders get to know their neighbors. Do you know someone we should feature? Email hello@richmondside.org or post a tip here.
Though Gilbert has been running for as many decades as she’s been alive, she grew up before Title IX, the 1972 law that mandated, among other policies, that educational institutions provide equal opportunity for women and men to participate in organized sports.
When she returned to college in midlife to earn a business degree to start an accounting firm, she realized she still had NCAA eligibility.
“I ran my first college track meet at Contra Costa College on my 50th birthday,” said Gilbert, who previously had earned a physical fitness degree at UC Berkeley.
Gilbert started volunteering as a coach with the Hercules High School track team in 2011. But well before the advent of organized women’s sports, Gilbert persuaded her high school physical education teacher to coach her for informal track meets, Folks said. She started off as a sprinter before realizing her potential as a long distance runner.
Now she runs really, really, really long distances.
“I wanted to do a hundred-miler before I couldn’t,” said Gilbert, whose slow, soft speaking cadence seems out of place with these herculean efforts. These ultra races take Gilbert 24 to 30 hours.
“I get to feed my — not obsession — but my joy of running,” she said. “Once I start, I want to finish. It kind of flows. I love to run overnight when everybody’s sleeping.”
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“Everything works better when I’m in shape.”
— Runner Sharlet Gilbert, 73
Crucial to these efforts, Gilbert said, is a solid support crew. Folks, a retired manager at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s Site 300 in San Joaquin County, captains that squad, armed with spreadsheets and backup clothing.
“My other sister is a marriage and family therapist, and her husband is a priest,” Gilbert said, describing the rest of the crew. “With the three of them I have everything covered.”
The crew is there to supply food, water, shelter and support, Folks said. “Pay attention,” is the directive for a crew member.
Running as a tonic for ailments of aging
Despite working hard on preparation, Gilbert continues to come up against the limits of her own body. She suffered her most recent injury at the Henderson, Nev., ultramarathon in February. After earning the 50-kilometer age group record last year, she returned for the 100-kilometer record, she said.
“Well I don’t know what happened, but I fell, hit my head, broke bones in my face, and got a traumatic brain injury,” she said.
But it didn’t hold her back for long. Just five months after her fall, she and Folks completed a 12-hour race at Point Pinole, running as the Boomer Sisters team.
For Gilbert, this determination to push her body is her source of healing. Running, she said, is necessary for long-term recovery.
“Everything works better when I’m in shape,” she said.
In Gilbert’s telling, these successes and shortfalls are casual, simple affairs. “When I went to the Olympics trials the first time…” she’ll start a sentence; “and that’s when my heel almost fractured vertically,” she’ll finish an anecdote.
“Being a Christian, one of my dreams was to run the Sea of Galilee Marathon [in Israel],” Gilbert said. “So I trained really hard, and we went down there, and I won.”
Gilbert — fueled on pasta and a dogged, lifelong determination — shied away from questions regarding a post-running future.
“I’ve watched those ahead and watched how they…” Gilbert trailed off, before pulling out a framed photo of her racing in the 1990s.
In that peak period, Gilbert qualified for the 1984, 1998, and 1996 Olympic trials, the last when she was 45. (Running at such a high level at such a mature age is not unheard of in the female professional running community, but it is rare.). She set her personal record for the marathon (2:38) in 1995, at 43. That year, the women’s world record was 2:25.
Despite the age, despite the injuries, Gilbert is still rounding the turns. When she discusses her cross-country racing itinerary — Boston to New York then back to San Francisco — one can’t help but think of a touring rock band.
“I’m trying not to push myself,” Gilbert said as she ticked off another upcoming race. “I also get very, very tired because of the [brain] injury.”
For the two sisters, training and racing is more than competition.
“In our second life, our older life, it’s given us something that we share, a connection,” Folks said. “It’s a gain not a loss.”
“My late husband would have said that running is inside of me and must come out as a creative expression,” Gilbert texted Richmondside later.
“Yes, much has been lost in physical performance, which I miss, but more is gained by the soul and spirit that doesn’t fade because it becomes a part of who I am,” she wrote. “Keep running.”
