E-Mail This Article to a Friend The great race In his new documentary, local filmmaker Bill Haney profiles five women, ages 50 to 82, who defy age in masters’ track-and-field competitions worldwide BY TAMARA WIEDER

PICTURE YOUR FAVORITE grandmother. She’s in her 80s, gray-haired and wrinkled, leaning heavily on her cane as she walks, or perhaps no longer walking at all.

Now picture Margaret Hinton. She’s 82, standing on the edge of a track, with a number pinned to her T-shirt. There’s no cane in sight.

In Racing Against the Clock, the latest documentary from local filmmaker Bill Haney, we meet Hinton and four other women, ages 50 to 77, all of whom spend their lives training for and competing in state and national track-and-field competitions, en route to the world-championship games and, for some of them, world records.

Haney, whose other film credits include Gift of the Game, a documentary about Cuban baseball, and The Road to Reconciliation, about the peace process in Northern Ireland, is a director and producer with the Waltham-based Uncommon Productions. He hasn’t yet screened Racing Against the Clock — which will premiere at the Boston Film Festival in September — for its five subjects. "It’s like, if you’ve made a birthday present for somebody you care about, and you built it yourself and it took you a year and a half," he muses. "You want to find the right moment to give it to them."

Q: Where did the idea for this film come from?

A: The general idea, which is that I find sports a really interesting way to explore social issues, kind of came from my last film, I guess — Gift of the Game. I produced a film a couple years ago that was on civil reconciliation in Northern Ireland, and it was a thoughtful film, but it was presented in a kind of expository, fairly thoughtful way. And it doesn’t make it fun for people to watch. So sports provide this great context for character examination, but it can actually just be awfully good fun to watch. And frankly kind of good fun to make.

Q: Did you have an interest in working with the elderly?

A: No. In this case, I had — and I guess in a way I sort of have — an interest in a lot of social issues, and I have a very good friend in Waltham, her name is Sarah Lawson, and she’s a single mother of two, around 40, and she took up running very late in life, having never run before competitively, and she made it to be one of the top three in America in her age class, which was then 35 to 40. I went to celebrate and support her during the National Championships, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw a 101-year-old guy running, and I said, okay, I’ve got to go talk to that guy. And it kind of went from there.

Q: How did you choose these particular five women to profile?

A: We started with 20 or 22 people, men and women. And we found that the kind of journey for women in sports, particularly when they’re in the ages that we talked about, has just been more dramatic. Women weren’t really allowed to play sports, or very little sports, 70 years ago. And there was pretty significant discrimination, even just social-convention discrimination, against women athletes 20 years ago. Title IX created a whole new series of choices, thus making the idea of some of the issues these women had faced surprising to girls, particularly. So part of it was that. Part of it was their own charisma and energy and attitudes. In a lot of ways, I find these women, in their daily living, celebrate the best ways to look at personal challenges in general and getting older in particular.

Q: What was the filming process like? How much time did you spend at these events and with these women?

A: We were with the women, these particular five women, in their homes — in a number of cases, repeated visits to their houses — and then we filmed them at a series of different sporting events over 12 months, oftentimes with two or three cameramen. The events themselves, the World Championships are two weeks long, the National Championships were a week or even a little bit longer, so we actually got to know these women pretty well. And that’s, of course, one of the great pleasures of being a documentary filmmaker.

Q: They all seemed to enjoy being on camera. Was that how they were from the start, or did they have to be eased into it?

A: They were all different. I think that they were, as older people can be, looking for listeners. You know, a good listener is appreciated by all of us, and these women were no exception. I think that the process of being interviewed gets people to think about their own lives in ways they might otherwise not be thinking of them. So they find it a journey of self-exploration that’s kind of interesting and kind of fun.

Q: Was there any one woman you got closest to?

A: I often think [about] that, and the answer is really no. I love all of them equally, for different reasons. So for an Irish-American kid from Boston to spend a week in black-women culture with Jackie was just phenomenal. And then the incredible determination in Phil was really fun. Margaret and Pat have such magical senses of humor, particularly Pat. I liked them all equally, I really did. In very different ways.

Q: Did making this film affect your notions of aging and the elderly?

A: Oh, yeah. I think that it’s a terrible thing that we see people’s bodies changing and we don’t really understand what’s happening to their minds or to their attitudes. It’s easy to just draw the conclusion that there’s some deterioration in other parts of their lives as well. So to see the competitive drive in a 77-year-old pole vaulter, or to watch this 82-year-old woman with a broken shoulder doing the high jump — it’s just unbelievable. So the pleasure of competition and of self-development, how these women kept that pleasure alive, has showed me a whole different view of getting older. And it’s also reminded me that so much of life is about your attitude toward what happens to you. They were kind of the real no-excuses program: "I’ve had cancer three times." "I have a pacemaker." "I’ve had my fourth pacemaker installed." "My husband was an alcoholic." "I’m poor, I don’t have a job." "They canceled my flight." There was no obstacle these girls couldn’t get over. It made my daily whimpering seem pretty pathetic.