At 67, She Became the First Woman Ever Over 65 to Break 3 Hours in a Marathon

On a cool November morning in Kobe, Mariko Yugeta ran a 2:59:02 marathon at 67 years and 187 days old.

She became the first woman in history over the age of 65 to break three hours for the distance.

This was not a fluke. Yugeta had run 3:01:06 in Himeji nine months earlier, and 3:01:28 in Tokyo the year before that.

She has been chasing a sub-three time since 1982.

What Actually Happened at Kobe

The Kobe Marathon on November 16, 2025 was the target. Yugeta went in with a specific plan: even splits, a low-90s pace-per-kilometer, and a strong final ten kilometers.

Her official time was 2:59:02, more than two minutes under her own W65-69 age-group world record and, per Japan Running News, the oldest sub-three by a woman ever recorded.

The previous W65 world best had stood at 3:07:21, set by fellow Japanese runner Junko Nakayama in 2023.

For context on how rare a sub-three marathon is at any age, only a fraction of runners in Japan, of any age, of any gender, cross the line under three hours.

A retired PE teacher and mother of four just did it at an age when most people are booking cruises.

The Backstory: A 43-Year Wait

Yugeta ran her first marathon in 1982 as a 24-year-old, finishing the Tokyo International Women's Marathon in 3:09:21.

She wanted sub-three back then and did not get it.

Life took over: marriage, four children, a full-time teaching career at a Saitama high school.

She kept running. But it was not until her youngest child started high school, when Yugeta was 50, that she joined a serious Tokyo running club and began real training again.

Eight years later, at 58, she finally broke three hours.

She has told interviewers that what drove her back to the track was regret, specifically the regret of not finishing what she started at 24. In her interview with Maurten, she framed the entire pursuit as unfinished business.

The math almost nobody notices

Consider the age-graded arithmetic. A 2:59:02 at 67 is roughly equivalent to a sub-2:14 marathon by an open-age male.

That is not a masters time.

That is a world-class time on the age-graded tables the World Masters Athletics community uses.

Put differently, if you have ever run a sub-3 marathon, you know how hard that number is.

Yugeta ran it after her body has been aging for four extra decades.

How She Trains: What Is Actually Different

Yugeta's training is not exotic. It is exceptionally consistent and it borrows from a source most runners over 60 dismiss: high school track kids.

She trains with teenagers

Yugeta joins high school track teams for interval workouts.

Reporters who have shown up to interview her have found her mid-session running 3000m, 2000m, 1000m repeats in roughly 11:23, 7:22 and 3:33.

Those are not easy times. Those are hard workout paces run against athletes 50 years younger.

She races often, and races are training

A regular Yugeta calendar can include five or more marathons a year, treated less as peak events and more as scheduled hard efforts.

Multiple times she has run sub-3:05 marathons a week apart, using each as a fitness probe for the next.

She stands on an inclined board for three minutes a day

Per interviews translated by Japan Running News and reported in Nippon.com, Yugeta stands on an inclined board every morning while brushing her teeth, loading her Achilles and calves for three minutes at a time. That is the entirety of her daily mobility ritual.

No hour-long yoga flow, no expensive gadget.

Just a wedge of wood, three minutes, every morning.

What the Science Says About Late-Life Speed

For decades, the assumption was that endurance performance drops roughly 10 percent per decade after age 30 and there is not much you can do about it. That assumption is being quietly rewritten.

Case-study research on world-record-holding masters marathoners published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Applied Physiology via the NIH National Library of Medicine shows that elite masters athletes routinely race marathons at 90 percent or more of their VO2max. That is a percentage typically associated with 25-year-olds, not 70-year-olds.

The mechanism appears to be use. Athletes who never stop stressing their aerobic system keep the aerobic system responsive.

Athletes who stop, lose it fast.

Yugeta is a walking version of that finding. She never stopped racing.

The wheel never got rusty.

What This Means For You

You are almost certainly not going to run a 2:59:02 at 67. Neither are most people.

But there are portable lessons in Yugeta's story that translate to any runner who wants to be running well in 20 years.

Do not accept the age-related pace decline as inevitable

A gradual decline is real. A collapse is not.

The runners who lose the most are the runners who train the least once life gets in the way. See our guide on how to start running at 50 and beyond if you are picking things back up.

Keep intensity in the mix

Almost every late-career elite masters runner still runs intervals. They just run fewer of them, with more recovery, and they take strains seriously.

This aligns with the daily habits of elite runners that translate to any age group.

Do the small thing every day

Three minutes on an inclined board is nothing. Three minutes on an inclined board every morning for eight years is a lot.

Choose one micro-habit, tie it to something you already do like brushing your teeth, and let compounding handle the rest.

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The Bigger Picture

What Yugeta did in Kobe is not just a nice masters running story. It is a data point in a growing body of evidence that the human aerobic system is more trainable, later in life, than the standard aging story allows.

The question stops being how much you have to give up, and starts being how much of the decline was ever inevitable in the first place.

For a similar arc closer to home, read Jeannie Rice, the 77-year-old marathon world record holder with the VO2 max of a 25-year-old.

Same shape of story. Same lesson.

Yugeta has said in interviews that she thinks she can go faster. At 67, she is still improving.

The finish line she crossed at 24 turned out to be a starting line she did not recognize until she was in her fifties.

That is the story worth carrying into your next long run.