On Wednesdays, Ruth Kazez gets up at 5 a.m. She does a little painting, or spends time with her Jack Russell Terrier, Punkin, and her many fish. Then, she goes swimming at the YMCA pool in State College.
As Kazez treads water on the side of the pool, other early risers swim laps nearby. Huge ducts above the water noisily circulate the hot and humid air. This morning, she’s “just going to do 2000 [meters]."
As she swims lap after lap to warm up, her slight frame forms a powerful and expertly streamlined freestyle stroke.
Kazez is 85-years-old, and up until a few years ago she was competing in triathlons all over the world. She’s done several Ironmans—that’s a back-to-back 2.4-mile swim, a 112-mile bicycle ride, followed by a full marathon on foot. For her 70th birthday, she ran a half Ironman—70.3 miles for 70 years.
Marvin Hall, a professor in the department of plant science at Penn State, spent 15 years training with Kazez, and ran that race with her. Hall remembers his first impression of her.
“Here’s somebody my mom’s age doing something I can't ever picture my mom doing,” he said. “It was just amazing. And she was very competitive, I mean you had to hustle or she’d beat you if she could.”
In her house in State College, Kazez has a room with walls and shelves covered in awards displaying her impressive athletic achievements.
“I’d say that there are several hundred of them, many from the Ironman, and there’s Irongirl also,” she said, gesturing to several particularly impressive looking awards. “Medals and ribbons are all from swim meets, I went to many swim meets before I got into triathlons."
Hanging next to these medals is proof of another talent: painting. Kazez displays some of her massive canvases around her home and the region. In this room, there’s a gigantic bee. It’s intimidating in size, but lovely and soft with a golden glow.
Still, she said, “I think if I saw a bee like that while I was at a triathlon I would not be very happy.”
Her paintings are very subtle, and while Kazez says she’s a sprinter in her races, her paintings are the opposite.
“They recede, they’re very very unaggressive,” she said. "No, they’re not sprinters at all. Very far from it. They’re big but very very quiet."
However, Kazez noted, she’s a sprinter in almost everything else.
“My second baby was born in a total of 52 minutes, so yes, everything,” she said with a laugh.
Kazez is hesitant to connect these two parts of her life and says they fulfill different roles. However, she does admit that her love of open space and movement draws her to moving fast and painting big.
“I don’t like to be uptight,” she said. “Just like the bicycling, I want to be out in the wide open roads and going free. I like big spaces. Deserts, oceans, no valleys. I’m not good at sitting still.”
Her former training partner, Hall, says because Kazez has kept her mind and body active—even as she gets on in age—she has been able to continue pursuing these passions.
“She's so different from everybody else, it’s like she refuses to let age affect her. And it's not only just her body, her mind, she just keeps doing things to stimulate her mind. I remember when the iPhones were just coming out she had to be on the waiting list to get an iPhone because she would not get behind the curve on this new technology," Hall recalled. "So it's not just her physical but her mental and everything else, just always pushing on the cutting edge out there.”
Despite all her impressive athletic and artistic accomplishments, Kazez is not without complaint.
“I don’t know, I don't feel like I'm in shape at all. My knee hurts, my elbow hurts." Kazez said, adding, “I definitely feel like I have that serious ailment that’s spelled with three letters, the first one is O.”
Still—even when the O-word ails her—she perseveres.