At 93, Emma Maria Mazzenga still gets the jitters before a race.
“On race day, I’m very tense,” she said. “People ask to interview me, and I tell them: Don’t come near me until I’ve run.”
Over the last four decades, Mazzenga has won 11 world titles, 31 European championships and 115 Italian races. She currently holds the 200-metre world record in the women’s over-90 category: 50.33 seconds, set in 2024, when she was 91.
Now she is giving scientists a rare look at just how much of the physical decline we associate with aging may not actually be inevitable.
Mazzenga ran as a university student in Padua, in northern Italy. She then stopped for three decades while she taught high school biology and raised two children, largely on her own after her husband died.
In 1986, when she was 53, the president of her old university running club rounded up former athletes for the growing field of masters competitions, for those over age 35.
“One by one, my friends quit,” she said. “I kept going.”
In this 2024 file photo, a then-90-year-old Mazzenga shows her membership card for the Italian Athletics Federation, ahead of a race in San Biagio di Callalta, Italy. It shows her birthdate: Aug. 1, 1933. (Remo Casilli/Reuters)
She still trains three times a week, mostly short repeats of 50 to 200 metres. Slow jogging bores her.
What drives her isn’t winning, Mazzenga said. In Italy, she has no rivals in her age category. “I come first because I have to. I’m the only one,” she said. “I can’t get any emotion out of that.”
So she races the clock instead. “If I win with a mediocre time, it gives me no satisfaction.”
Her proudest moment is still her first world title, the 400-metre W75 race at the World Masters Athletics Championships in Sacramento, Calif., won in 2011.
“There were just a handful of us Italians. I found myself alone on the podium,” Mazzenga recalled.
WATCH | Watch Mazzenga compete in 100m race in Florence, Italy, last month:
Watch Emma Mazzenga, 93, compete in 100-metre race
Italian sprinter Emma Mazzenga, 93, competes in a women’s 100-metre race in Florence, Italy, in September. Mazzenga is an accomplished runner whose athletic performance is providing new insights into human aging.
From VO2 to muscle fibres
But eventually, her performances drew a different audience: Scientists.
Two years ago, Antonio La Torre, a scientist at the University of Milan and technical director of Italy’s athletic federation, tipped off two researchers who were studying how the body ages.
“We were told there was this woman who was able to run 200 metres in a very short time,” said Martino Franchi, an associate professor of human physiology at the University of Padua. “But it was her age that we were really interested in.”
Mazzegna became the most extreme case in a broader, two-year project called Trajector-Age, which tracked how muscles, nerves, heart and metabolism change in people over 50 to see whether exercise can slow decline.
Researchers from several Italian universities and the University of Wisconsin-Madison put Mazzenga through a gruelling cycling test and took biopsies from her thigh.
Mazzenga, then 90, competes in the 100-metre W90 category race in San Biagio di Callalta, Italy, on May 4, 2024. (Remo Casilli/Reuters)
Franchi says Mazzenga’s maximal oxygen consumption is comparable to that of someone in their 50s. Also known as a VO2 max, it represents the greatest amount of oxygen a body can take in and use — a key measure of cardiovascular fitness.
“And she’s 90,” he said. “This is fantastic.”
The bigger surprise was inside her muscles, said Franchi. Mazzenga has lost some of the fast-twitch fibres used for explosive movement, although fewer than expected. But her slow-twitch fibres — the ones that resist fatigue — are extraordinary.
“They are as big as a girl in her 20s,” he said. “That’s unique.”
Martino Franchi gestures toward a screen showing a microscopic view of muscle fibres at his lab at the University of Padua, in Italy. (CBC)
Researchers think those unusually large fibres may help her hold her pace and compensate, at least partly, for the fast fibres lost with age.
Aging has happened, Franchi said, “but in a slower way.” And so many years of training means that her body runs almost on auto-pilot when her feet hit the track.
The research was published earlier this year as two cases in the Journal of Applied Physiology, with a rendition of a Mazzenga landing on the cover. Lead scientist Marta Colosio received an award for the work at the American Physiology summit.
The team is now analyzing a second round of biopsies, along with genetic and molecular data, trying to tease apart what Mazzenga inherited versus what decades of training may have preserved.
Mazzenga walks with Martino Franchi, one of the researchers who has studied the 93-year-old’s muscles and athletic performance to glean new insights into human aging. (CBC)
‘A bit of a rarity’
Mazzenga has her own theory. “I always say that if I had been sitting on the sofa, I would have aged differently.”
With the running came fame — eventually. “No one paid much attention to me in my 80s, but after 90, yes,” she jokes. “They look at me as a bit of a rarity.”
She now speaks regularly at public events, most recently at la Repubblica’s Festival di Salute, an annual health festival that draws Nobel laureates, scientists and sports champions.
As friends die and family members get busy with their own lives, Mazzenga says those connections — along with her masters teammates — matter almost as much as the training.
Mazzenga shows off her first pair of track shoes, when she first took to racing in her early 50s, at her home in Padua, Italy. (Megan Williams/CBC)
Franchi has his own reason for pushing exercise.
During the COVID-19 lockdowns, he noticed his father, then in his 70s, struggling to get up from the sofa. So Franchi printed out graphs linking inactivity to mortality.
“I said, ‘Dad, I study sarcopenia. This is it,'” said Franchi, referring to the loss of muscle mass, strength and function with age. “He got scared, so he went back to the gym.”
Today, Franchi’s father can pull off full lunges and hikes several times a week.
Franchi likes to tell the story to his students, telling them that physical activity is important — but be sure to keep doing it when you’re older.
Asked what she’d tell someone 80, or even 90, thinking about taking up a sport, Mazzenga laughs. “You’d want to start a little earlier.”
For those still able, she says, see a doctor, find a coach and match your body to the effort.
She herself has no plans to slow down. At a recent club final, she ran faster than she had two years earlier. “I was very pleased.”
Mazzenga, centre, is seen in a photo with two fellow racers when she won the European Championship in 1998. (Megan Williams/CBC)