Lew Hollander

“What type of work did you do before retiring?”
“I resent you using the past tense,” said Hollander, a physicist who still works in his chosen field. “I think I’m still functioning.”
Still functioning? Uh, yeah. In October, Hollander finished the Ford Ironman World Championship for the 21^st time (out of 21 starts), jogging down Alii Drive well ahead of the midnight deadline, coming home in 15 hours, 48 minutes. Four weeks later he completed the 70.3 world champs in Clearwater.
When Hollander checked out of his Clearwater hotel, a person at the front desk made a big deal about his feat at 80. A gentleman apparently in his 50s looked at Hollander and asked, “What do you take?”
Warning. Warning. Another foolish question.
“Do you want to spend a day with me?” Hollander told the man.
The guy thought for some time, then said, “No.”
“It’s like (the guy’s asking), ‘Is there a magic pill? I don’t want to do any of the training crap. I just want to take a prescription,’” says Hollander. “There isn’t any pill. It’s (and here he spells out the word) W-O-R-K.”
Work. Move. Explore. Be active. Be involved. Be curious. Splice them all together and you’ve got a peek into what makes Hollander tick. And while there isn’t a magic pill, he is big on supplements, particularly amino acids.
“And I do get an implant once in a while,” he said.
Specifically, he has received placenta implants, which according to medical reports fight the aging process. On the Integra Medical Center website, Hollander is quoted as saying, “I feel the procedure has improved my vision, mental acuity, hearing and general health.”
Asked about the procedure recently, Hollander says, “Does it help me (athletically)? I don’t know. I can’t say yes. I haven’t felt any better when I get them or don’t get them. But I figure at this point in life, I can’t afford not to take advantage of what’s available. I seem to be doing pretty well so far. So I’ll stick to my program.”
Besides the obvious (exercise and exercise some more) Hollander credits a couple other tenets for his athletic longevity, such as:
Stretching. He stretches 30 minutes a day, first thing after rolling out of bed. “I get out of bed, see if everything’s working, and it is,” he jokes.
Anaerobic training. “My mantra is anaerobic every day,” says Hollander. “I think that’s really important.” So he embraces fartlek run workouts or presses the pace when pedaling uphill. “You need to push yourself,” he says.
Hollander doesn’t lift weights, nor is he fanatical about his diet. He emphasizes fruits and vegetables, but confesses to possessing a sweet tooth. “I love ’em and I shouldn’t eat ’em,” says the man who wrote a science fiction book entitled “And Chocolate Shall Lead Us.” “I don’t want to recommend them to anybody else.”
Hollander’s precursor to triathlons is hardly the typical “5Ks, 10Ks, work your way up to the marathon, get burned out running, start cross training, voila, you’re a triathlete.”
Hollander’s athletic background was long-distance horseback riding, then rides and ties, the two-person running/horseback riding relay adventures.
“That’s my favorite sport,” he says. “The most fun you can have with your pants on.”
By 1980, he sampled his first marathon. His time in that first 26.2-miler: about 5 hours. His personal record: 3:17 at New York in the early ’80s. He estimates he has run about 50 solo marathons and completed a similar number of Ironmans.
In 1984, he sampled the Western States 100, which many consider to be the most taxing 100-mile ultramarathon. Then he submitted his qualifications to enter the 1985 Ironman Hawaii and was accepted. (A quarter century ago, there was no qualifying, no lottery system.) Hollander headed to Kona and finished in 15:47, one minute faster than his time last October.
Regarding training, Hollander runs three or four times a week (about 20 miles total), swims four or five times (for about an hour) and bikes “as much as I can.”
He doesn’t follow any exact training regimen.
“You keep trying to put me in a box, and I don’t belong in a box,” he says.
Instead, he says, “I sort of react, rather than run so long. I just do whatever I want to do every day.”
Hollander admits pride plays a factor in his lifestyle. Take the first time he joined a group for a ride some 25 years ago.
“They got way ahead,” he recalls. “When I came into the little parking lot everyone’s putting their bikes away and someone says, ‘Did you get a flat, Lew?’ I never forgot that. I still think about that. I don’t let ’em get away now, though.”
Hollander works as a consultant and is particularly fascinated by nanotechnology, which the Merriam Webster dictionary defines as “the science of manipulating materials on an atomic or molecular scale, especially to build microscopic devices.”
“It’s the most important thing that’s ever happened in science,” he says.
Socially, Hollander stays busy keeping in touch with his six children, five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
“He just can’t sit still for very long,” says Hanne, Hollander’s wife of 43 years. “He has something going all the time. He’s either doing business, training or talking to the kids. He only sits still when he’s sleeping.”

Hollander is not the oldest person to finish Ironman Hawaii. Illinois’ Robert McKeague was months older when he finished the 2005 race in 16:21.

“I finished (33 minutes) faster,” Hollander says. “I’ll take that.”

Next year, at 81, he’ll take a shot at becoming the oldest person to finish triathlon’s most famous race.