Steve Thomas was Estes’ oldest participant in this year’s BOLDERBoulder – Part III

What a year for the Estes Valley Voice’s “Older BOLDERBoulder” theme for the BB10K, the fourth-largest road race in the USA.

This year’s oldest finisher was 95-year-old George Hambacher from Boulder, while the oldest finisher from Estes Park was 80-year-old Steve Thomas, a retired political science professor from the University of Colorado, Denver. Last year, Louisville’s George Pierce, at 100, set the record for the oldest finisher since the BB10K began in 1979.

This year’s Estes Park competitors in that race included 55 people aged 8 to 80, and here’s the scoop on that impressive 80-year-old.

When Thomas was recorded as the oldest Estes Park finisher in the BB10K last week, he was disappointed with his time, 2:01:32, because he walked more than he jogged, he says.

“This year I wanted to jog the whole thing, but I was a little more tired, and I only ran the first two miles,” he explains. 

Two days before the race, Thomas rode his electric bike at an altitude of 12,000 feet on Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park for fun. The day before the race, Thomas and his wife, Carol Dreselly, honored a request to fast for 24 hours from a relative whose daughter’s brain cancer had just returned. Starting the race with a calorie deficit may have caused him some weakness. 

He has run the BB10K more than ten times during his 44 years in this area, and his favorite was “running with the twins,” his sons Nick and Michael, who were two-year-olds in 1986. This year, the twins, now 41, once again finished right alongside their dad. Both told him after the race that they stayed with him on the course because they were worried he might pass out because of his 24-hour fast.

Thomas’ health journey seems like a miracle, but he credits his lifestyle changes after a “do-or-die” ultimatum and the research of two famous doctors. Diagnosed with heart disease by age 53 and with a family history of heart attacks, Thomas and his cardiologist were considering a stint, but he had heard about “reversing heart disease” from American physician and author Dean Ornish and Caldwell B. Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic.

After a phone conversation with Esselstyn, Thomas changed to a vegetarian diet and committed to daily exercise, which changed his heart. One year later, he had no more signs of arteriosclerosis, two years later, his heart was normal, and five years ago, at age 75, his heart was performing 200% better than most men his age.

“The heart repaired itself,” he says, and today, “This lifestyle of daily exercise and a vegetarian diet has somewhat changed my ideas of what ‘growing old’ means.”

Thomas says his lifestyle these days keeps him in shape all year, so he doesn’t specifically train for the BB10K, and he is “not a runner.” He works out on an elliptical machine six to seven days a week because it is low-impact. He uses high-intensity interval training every other day, alternating 30 seconds of “as fast as I can” with 90 seconds of walking to recover, for 25 minutes. Then, on the alternate days, he takes a normal 25-minute walk on the elliptical.

He also credits Kenneth H. Cooper’s book “Aerobics,” published in 1968, which demonstrates the positive effects of aerobic exercise. 

Although this series of BB10K articles has focused on the “older” competitors in the BB10K, the fastest men and women from Estes Park in the race are also worth mentioning: 29-year-old Josh Young finished 38:14, and 27-year-old Melissa George finished 40:58.

Estes finishers in the 2025 BOLDERBoulder