Never Too Old

Never Too Old

At 58, Tom Cooka was the oldest student athlete at Northland Pioneer College in Arizona. Thirteen years later, last July, Cooka won gold in the 10K race for the 70-74 age group at the National Senior Olympics in Baton Rouge, La. It was the high point of a running career that already has spanned more than 60 years, and the end is nowhere in sight.

Cooka, the son of a Tewa father from the village of Hano and a Hopi mother from Hotevilla, was one of seven children on the family ranch near Keams Canyon, on the Hopi Reservation in northeastern Arizona.

When Cooka was just 5, his father woke him before dawn one morning and announced that it was now the boy’s job to gather up the horses pastured overnight, roughly four miles from the ranch. Young Tom would go out, find them, and then—too little to catch and ride one—would chase them home.

“I hated it,” he admits, “but it was really a blessing because that’s what started me running.”

During World War II, his dad went to work for the railroad and the family moved to Winslow, Ariz., 70 miles south of the reservation. Cooka joined the track team at Winslow High School and, upon graduation, served in the Air Force as an airborne radio operator in Korea for three-and-a-half years. Through it all there was one constant: “Wherever I was,” he says, “I always kept running.”

Cooka planned to go to college and try out for the Olympics after the military, but marriage and a family made him set those goals aside. Like his dad, he went to work for the railroad.

“I lived out of a suitcase,” he says, “working little one-man stations in Grants, Skull Valley, Castle Hot Springs, Seligman, Peach Springs, and dozens of other little towns along the route. I always said if a better job came along, I’d take it, but it never did.”

By then Cooka’s family was growing, and growing up. He and his wife, Mildred, raised six children, and the four boys became Cooka’s running partners. “We’d go to the track together—it was a family thing,” he says.

In 1988, a few years before he retired, Cooka decided it was time to begin to fulfill his boyhood dreams. He enrolled in Northland Pioneer College in Winslow and asked to join the cross-country team.

“The only way they would let me do it is if I took a full course load,” says Cooka. “So I went to school full time at night, worked during the day, and tried out for track.” He made the team, though he was 40 years older than most of his teammates.

While Cooka attended Northland, his youngest son, Terence, was enrolled at Mesa Community College, also in Arizona. The two schools competed in track, and inevitably, Cooka wound up running against his son.

“He beat me every time,” Cooka admits.

“I’d been running against my dad all my life,” says Terence, “so it really wasn’t different for me.”

Cooka retired from the railroad in 1991 and now trains three days a week, doing speed work one day, hills another, and long runs the third, with two days off before repeating the regimen again.

“I run 40 to 45 miles a week,” he says. “My training schedule enables me to compete in any terrain. I also let my body rest, so I’ve never had an injury.”

Cooka and his second wife, Melba, live in Payson, Ariz., (pop. 13,620) and have 13 grandchildren, most of them living nearby. Retirement has spawned a pair of diverse secondary careers for Cooka in landscaping and as an oil painter. And of course, he still runs.

“I was born a Hopi, and I’ll die a Hopi,” says Cooka. “I run … to honor my Hopi traditions.”

Tanya Lee is a freelance writer from Flagstaff, Ariz.

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